Thermodynamic Geometry of Strongly Interacting Matter

TL;DR

This paper applies thermodynamic geometry to strongly interacting matter, estimating the deconfinement temperature in QCD using lattice data and the hadron resonance gas model, finding good agreement with existing estimates.

Contribution

It introduces a geometric criterion based on scalar curvature to determine the (pseudo-)critical temperature in QCD thermodynamics, combining lattice and hadron resonance gas data.

Findings

The geometric criterion $R(T,)=0$ effectively estimates the deconfinement temperature.

QCD-derived $T_c$ aligns well with lattice and phenomenological data.

Hadron resonance gas crossing temperature $T_h$ is higher, indicating confinement remnants.

Abstract

The thermodynamic geometry formalism is applied to strongly interacting matter to estimate the deconfinement temperature. The curved thermodynamic metric for Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is evaluated on the basis of lattice data, whereas the hadron resonance gas model is used for the hadronic sector. Since the deconfinement transition is a crossover, the geometric criterion used to define the \mbox{(pseudo-)critical} temperature, as a function of the baryonchemical potential $\mu_B$, is $R(T,\mu_B)=0$, where $R$ is the scalar curvature. The (pseudo-)critical temperature, $T_c$, resulting from QCD thermodynamic geometry is in good agreement with lattice and phenomenological freeze-out temperature estimates. The crossing temperature, $T_h$, evaluated by the hadron resonance gas, which suffers of some model dependence, is larger than $T_c$ (about $20\%$) signaling remnants of confinement above the transition.