Inhibition of splitting of the chiral and deconfinement transition due to rotation in QCD: the phase diagram of linear sigma model coupled to Polyakov loop

TL;DR

This paper investigates how rotation affects the separation of chiral and deconfinement transitions in QCD, finding that physical causality constraints significantly inhibit their splitting in realistic conditions.

Contribution

It demonstrates that causality conditions prevent the splitting of phase transition temperatures in rotating systems, contrasting with previous predictions of significant splitting at ultra-relativistic speeds.

Findings

Rotation-induced splitting is negligible (~1 MeV) at realistic angular velocities.

System size has a larger impact on temperature splitting than rotation.

Ultra-relativistic boundary velocities can enhance phase transition splitting.

Abstract

We discuss the effect of rigid rotation on the critical temperatures of deconfinement and chiral transitions in the linear sigma model coupled to quarks and the Polyakov loop. We point out the essential role of the causality condition, which requires that any point of the system should rotate slower than the velocity of light. We show that imposing this physical requirement leads to inhibition of the splitting between the chiral and confining transitions, which becomes negligibly small ({\Delta}T ~ 1 MeV or less) for experimentally relevant, slow angular velocities {\Omega} ~ 10 MeV of a 5-10 fm-sized systems. Moreover, the boundedness of the system has a much bigger effect on temperature splitting than the rotation itself: the splitting reaches 10 MeV in a small, one-fermi-sized non-rotating system. The temperature splitting may, however, become enhanced in an academic limit of ultra-relativistic regimes when the boundary of the system rotates at near-to-light velocities.