No Arabic abstract
These days, as high energy particle colliders become unavailable for testing speculative theoretical ideas, physicists are looking to other environments that may provide extreme conditions where theory confronts physical reality. One such circumstance may arise at high temperature $T$, which perhaps can be attained in heavy ion collisions or in astrophysical settings. It is natural therefore to examine the high-temperature behavior of the standard model, and here I shall report on recent progress in constructing the high-$T$ limit of~QCD.
We show that topological superfluid strings/vortices with flux tubes exist in the color-flavor locked (CFL) phase of color superconductors. Using a Ginzburg-Landau free energy we find the configurations of these strings. These strings can form during the transition from the normal phase to the CFL phase at the core of very dense stars. We discuss an interesting scenario for a network of strings and its evolution at the core of dense stars.
We analyse the high-energy limit of the gluon-gluon scattering amplitude in QCD, and display an intriguing relation between the finite parts of the one-loop gluon impact factor and the finite parts of the two-loop Regge trajectory.
We study correlation functions of spatially separated static quark-antiquark pairs in (2+1)-flavor QCD in order to investigate onset and nature of color screening at high temperatures. We perform lattice calculations in a wide temperature range, $140 le T le 5814,{rm MeV}$, using the highly improved staggered quark action and several lattice spacings to control discretization effects. By comparing at high temperatures our lattice results to weak-coupling calculations as well as to the zero temperature result for the energy of a static quark-antiquark pair, we observe that color screening sets in at $rT approx 0.3$. Furthermore, we also observe that in the range $0.3 lesssim r T lesssim 0.6$ weak-coupling calculations in the framework of suitable effective field theories provide an adequate picture of color screening.
QCD strings originate from high-energy scattering in the form of Reggeons and Pomerons, and have been studied in some detail in lattice numerical simulations. Production of multiple strings, with their subsequent breaking, is now a mainstream model of high energy $pp$ and $pA$ collisions. Recent LHC experiments revealed that high multiplicity end of such collisions show interesting collective effects. This ignited an interest in the interaction of QCD strings and multi-string dynamics. Holographic models, collectively known as AdS/QCD, developed in the last decade, describe both hadronic spectroscopy and basic thermodynamics, but so far no studies of the QCD strings have been done in this context. The subject of this paper is to do this. First, we study in more detail the scalar sector of hadronic spectroscopy, identifying glueballs and scalar mesons, and calculate the degree of their mixing. The QCD strings, holographic images of the fundamental strings, thus have a gluonic core and a sigma cloud. The latter generates $sigma$ exchanges and collectivization of the strings, affecting, at a certain density, the chiral condensate and even the minimum of the effective string potential, responsible for the very existence of the QCD strings. Finally, we run dynamical simulations of the multi-string systems, in the spaghetti setting approximating central $pA$ collisions, and specify conditions for their collectivization into a black hole, or the dual QGP fireball.
We clarify the derivation of high-energy QCD evolution equations from the fundamental gauge symmetry of QCD. The gauge-fixed classical action of the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) is shown to be invariant under a suitable BRST symmetry, that holds after the separation of the gluon modes into their fast classical (background) part, the soft component and the semifast one, over which the one-step quantum evolution is carried out. The resulting Slavnov-Taylor (ST) identity holds to all orders in perturbation theory and strongly constrains the CGC effective field theory (EFT) arising from the integration of the soft modes. We show that the ST identity guarantees gauge-invariance of the EFT. It also allows to control the dependence on the gauge-fixing choice for the semifast modes (usually the lightcone gauge in explicit computations). The formal properties of the evolution equations valid in different regimes (BKFL, JIMWLK, ...) can be all derived in a unified setting within this algebraic approach.