Thermodynamic potential for quark-gluon plasma with finite quark masses and chemical potential

Abstract

We summarize the derivation of the finite temperature, finite chemical potential thermodynamic potential in the bag-model approximation to quantum chromodynamics (QCD) that includes a finite $s$-quark mass in the Feynman diagram contributions for both zero-order and two-loop corrections to the quark interaction. The thermodynamic potential for quarks in QCD is a desired ingredient for computations of the equation of state in the early universe, supernovae, neutron stars, and heavy-ion collisions. The 2-loop contributions are normally divergent and become even more difficult in the limit of finite quark masses and finite chemical potential. We introduce various means to interpolate between the low and high chemical potential limits. Although physically well motivated, we show that the infinite series Pad\'e rational polynomial interpolation scheme introduces spurious poles. Nevertheless, we show that lower order interpolation schemes such as polynomial interpolation reproduce the Pad\'e result without the presence of spurious poles. We propose that in this way one can determine the equation of state for the two-loop corrections for arbitrary chemical potential, temperature and quark mass. This provides a new realistic bag-model treatment of the QCD equation of state. We compute the QCD phase diagram with up to the two-loop corrections. We show that the two-loop corrections decrease the pressure of the quark-gluon plasma and therefore increase the critical temperature and chemical potential of the phase transition. We also show, however, that the correction for finite $s$-quark mass in the two-loop correction serves to decrease the critical temperature for the quark-hadron phase transition in the early universe.