The quark degrees of freedom of the QGP with special focus on mass effects are investigated. A next-to-leading-order perturbation theory approach with quark mass dependence is applied and compared to lattice QCD results.
We evaluate the second and fourth order quark number susceptibilities in hot QCD using two variations of resummed perturbation theory. On one hand, we carry out a one-loop calculation within hard-thermal-loop perturbation theory, and on the other han
d perform a resummation of the four-loop finite density equation of state derived using a dimensionally reduced effective theory. Our results are subsequently compared with recent high precision lattice data, and their agreement thoroughly analyzed.
We have investigated the fluctuations and the higher order susceptibilities of quark number, isospin number, electric charge and strangeness at vanishing chemical potential for 2+1 flavor Polyakov loop extended Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model. The calculat
ions are performed for the bound effective potential in the quark sector requiring up to eight quark interaction terms. These have been contrasted to the lattice results which currently have somewhat heavier quarks in the light flavor sector. The results show sufficient qualitative agreement. For comparison we also present the results obtained with the conventional effective potential containing upto six quark interaction terms.
Many lattice studies of heavy quark diffusion originate from a colour-electric correlator, obtained as a leading term after an expansion in the inverse of the heavy-quark mass. In view of the fact that the charm quark is not particularly heavy, we co
nsider subleading terms in the expansion. Working out correlators up to $O(1/M^2)$, we argue that the leading corrections are suppressed by $O(T/M)$, and one of them can be extracted from a colour-magnetic correlator. The corresponding transport coefficient is non-perturbative already at leading order in the weak-coupling expansion, and therefore requires a non-perturbative determination.
Considering the strong field approximation we compute the hard thermal loop pressure at finite temperature and chemical potential of hot and dense deconfined QCD matter in lowest Landau level in one-loop order. We consider the anisotropic pressure in
the presence of the strong magnetic field i.e., longitudinal and transverse pressure along parallel and perpendicular to the magnetic field direction. As a first effort, we compute and discuss the anisotropic quark number susceptibility of deconfined QCD matter in lowest Landau level. The longitudinal quark number susceptibility is found to increase with the temperature whereas the transverse one decreases with the temperature. We also compute the quark number susceptibility in the weak field approximation. We find that the thermomagnetic correction to the quark number susceptibility is very marginal in the weak field approximation.
The vector channel spectral function at zero spatial momentum is calculated at next-to-leading order in thermal QCD for any quark mass. It corresponds to the imaginary part of the massive quark contribution to the photon polarization tensor. The spec
trum shows a well defined transport peak in contrast to both the heavy quark limit studied previously, where the low frequency domain is exponentially suppressed at this order and the naive massless case where it vanishes at leading order and diverges at next-to-leading order. From our general expressions, the massless limit can be taken and we show that no divergences occur if done carefully. Finally, we compare the massless limit to results from lattice simulations.