No Arabic abstract
In his recent Comments E. Shuryak reiterates old, unfortunately misleading arguments in favor of deconfined Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) immediately above the chiral restoration pseudocritical temperature. In a Comment devoted to our view of QCD at high temperatures he does not address and even mention the essence of our arguments. In recent years a new hidden symmetry in QCD was discovered. It is a symmetry of the electric sector of QCD, that is higher than the chiral symmetry of the QCD Lagrangian as the whole. This symmetry was clearly observed above T_c in spatial correlators and very recently also in time correlators. The latter correlators are directly related to observable spectral density. Then in a model-independent way we conclude that degrees of freedom in QCD above T_c, but below roughly 3T_c, are chirally symmetric quarks bound by the chromoelectric field into color-singlet compounds without the chromomagnetic effects. This regime of QCD has been referred to as a Stringy Fluid since such objects are very reminiscent of strings.At higher temperatures there is a very smooth transition to the partonic degrees of freedom, i.e. to the QGP regime. Here we will address some of the points made by Shuryak.
While the QCD Lagrangian as the whole is only chirally symmetric, its electric part has larger chiral-spin SU(2)_{CS} and SU(2N_F) symmetries. This allows separation of the electric and magnetic interactions in a given reference frame. Artificial truncation of the near-zero modes of the Dirac operator results in the emergence of the SU(2)_{CS} and SU(2N_F) symmetries in hadron spectrum. This implies that while the confining electric interaction is distributed among all modes of the Dirac operator, the magnetic interaction is located at least predominantly in the near-zero modes. Given this observation one could anticipate that above the pseudocritical temperature, where the near-zero modes of the Dirac operator are suppressed, QCD is SU(2)_{CS} and SU(2N_F) symmetric, which means absence of deconfinement in this regime. Solution of the N_F=2 QCD on the lattice with a chirally symmetric Dirac operator reveals that indeed in the interval Tc - 3Tc QCD is approximately SU(2)_{CS} and SU(2N_F) symmetric which implies that degrees of freedom are chirally symmetric quarks bound by the chromoelectric field into color-singlet objects without the chromomagnetic effects. This regime is referred to as a Stringy Fluid. At larger temperatures this emergent symmetry smoothly disappears and QCD approaches the Quark-Gluon Plasma regime with quasifree quarks. The Hadron Gas, the Stringy Fluid and the Quark-Gluon Plasma differ by symmetries, degrees of freedom and properties.
There are no three regimes of QCD, as speculated in that paper. There are only two, separated by already well known $T_csim 155, MeV$. Above it electric interactions are screened rather then confined. Magnetic ones remain confined all the way to $Trightarrow infty$. Spectrum of mesonic screening masses is there, but they do not represent real masses. At high $T$ they correspond to heavy quarkonia of 2+1 d gauge theory, which is well known to be a confining theory. There is no reason to expect any transition unbinding them, at $Tsim 1, GeV$ as claimed. I make calculation of correction to screening masses in 2+1d at high temperature including spatial screening tension and find results in agreement with recent lattice data.
We propose a practical way of circumventing the sign problem in lattice QCD simulations with a theta-vacuum term. This method is the reweighting method for the QCD Lagrangian after the chiral transformation. In the Lagrangian, the P-odd mass term as a cause of the sign problem is minimized. Additionally, we investigate theta-vacuum effects on the QCD phase diagram for the realistic 2+1 flavor system, using the three-flavor Polyakov-extended Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (PNJL) model and the entanglement PNJL model as an extension of the PNJL model. The theta-vacuum effects make the chiral transition sharper. We finally investigate theta dependence of the transition temperature and compare with the result of the pure gauge lattice simulation with imaginary theta parameter.
We draw the three-flavor phase diagram as a function of light- and strange-quark masses for both zero and imaginary quark-number chemical potential, using the Polyakov-loop extended Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model with an effective four-quark vertex depending on the Polyakov loop. The model prediction is qualitatively consistent with 2+1 flavor lattice QCD prediction at zero chemical potential and with degenerate three-flavor lattice QCD prediction at imaginary chemical potential.
For special kinematic configurations involving a single momentum scale, certain standard relations, originating from the Slavnov-Taylor identities of the theory, may be interpreted as ordinary differential equations for the ``kinetic term of the gluon propagator. The exact solutions of these equations exhibit poles at the origin, which are incompatible with the physical answer, known to diverge only logarithmically; their elimination hinges on the validity of two integral conditions that we denominate ``asymmetric and ``symmetric sum rules, depending on the kinematics employed in their derivation. The corresponding integrands contain components of the three-gluon vertex and the ghost-gluon kernel, whose dynamics are constrained when the sum rules are imposed. For the numerical treatment we single out the asymmetric sum rule, given that its support stems predominantly from low and intermediate energy regimes of the defining integral, which are physically more interesting. Adopting a combined approach based on Schwinger-Dyson equations and lattice simulations, we demonstrate how the sum rule clearly favors the suppression of an effective form factor entering in the definition of its kernel. The results of the present work offer an additional vantage point into the rich and complex structure of the three-point sector of QCD.