A system H with a Hagedorn-like mass spectrum imparts its unique temperature T_H to any other system coupled to it. An H system radiates particles in preexisting physical and chemical equilibrium. These particles form a saturated vapor at temperature T_H. This coexistence describes a first order phase transition. An H system is nearly indifferent to fragmentation into smaller H systems. A lower mass cut-off in the spectrum does not significantly alter the general picture. These properties of the Hagedorn thermostats naturally explain a single value of hadronization temperature observed in elementary particle collisions at high energies and lead to some experimental predictions.
The hot nuclear matter created at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) has been characterized by near-perfect fluid behavior. We demonstrate that this stands in contradiction to the identification of QCD quasi-particles with the thermodynamic degrees of freedom in the early (fluid) stage of heavy ion collisions. The empirical observation of constituent quark ``$n_q$ scaling of elliptic flow is juxtaposed with the lack of such scaling behavior in hydrodynamic fluid calculations followed by Cooper-Frye freeze-out to hadrons. A ``quasi-particle transport time stage after viscous effects break down the hydrodynamic fluid stage, but prior to hadronization, is proposed to reconcile these apparent contradictions. However, without a detailed understanding of the transitions between these stages, the ``$n_q$ scaling is not a necessary consequence of this prescription. Also, if the duration of this stage is too short, it may not support well defined quasi-particles. By comparing and contrasting the coalescence of quarks into hadrons with the similar process of producing light nuclei from nucleons, it is shown that the observation of ``$n_{q}$ scaling in the final state does not necessarily imply that the constituent degrees of freedom were the relevant ones in the initial state.
We make a simple observation about two models used to treat the region near the critical temperature of QCD, quasiparticle and matrix models. While they appear very different, we show how these two models might be related. We also present results for the temperature dependence of the ratio of the shear viscosity to the entropy in a matrix model, and suggest that quasi-particle models may behave similarly.
Inspired by Laughlins theory of the fractional quantum Hall effect, we propose a wave function for the quark-gluon plasma and the nucleons. In our model, each quark is transformed into a composite particle via the simultaneous attachment of a spin monopole and an isospin monopole. This is induced by the mesons endowed with both spin and isospin degrees of freedom. The interactions in the strongly-correlated quark-gluon system are governed by the topological wrapping number of the monopoles, which is an odd integer to ensure that the overall wave function is antisymmetric. The states of the quark-gluon plasma and the nucleons are thus uniquely determined by the combination of the monopole wrapping number m and the total quark number N. The radius squared of the quark-gluon plasma is expected to be proportional to mN. We anticipate the observation of such proportionality in the heavy ion collision experiments.
Wakes created by a parton moving through a static and infinitely extended quark-gluon plasma are considered. In contrast to former investigations collisions within the quark-gluon plasma are taken into account using a transport theoretical approach (Boltzmann equation) with a Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook collision term. Within this model it is shown that the wake structure changes significantly compared to the collisionless case.
We present a calculation of the heavy quark transport coefficients in a quark-gluon plasma under the presence of a strong external magnetic field, within the Lowest Landau Level (LLL) approximation. In particular, we apply the Hard Thermal Loop (HTL) technique for the resummed effective gluon propagator, generalized for a hot and magnetized medium. Using the derived effective HTL gluon propagator and the LLL quark propagator we analytically derive the full results for the longitudinal and transverse momentum diffusion coefficients as well as the energy losses for charm and bottom quarks beyond the static limit. We also show numerical results for these coefficients in two special cases where the heavy quark is moving either parallel or perpendicular to the external magnetic field.