The deconfinement phase transition, hadronization and the NJL model

Abstract

One of the confident predictions of QCD is that at sufficiently high temperature and/or density, hadronic matter should undergo a thermodynamic phase transition to a colour deconfined state of matter - popularly called the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). In low energy effective theories of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), one usually talks of the chiral transition for which a well defined order parameter exists. We investigate the dissociation of pions and kaons in a medium of hot quark matter decsribed by the Nambu - Jona Lasinio (NJL) model. The decay widths of pion and kaon are found to be large but finite at temperature much higher than the critical temperature for the chiral (or deconfinement) transition, the kaon decay width being much larger. Thus pions and even kaons (with a lower density compared to pions) may coexist with quarks and gluons at such high temperatures. On the basis of such premises, we investigate the process of hadronization in quark-gluon plasma with special emphasis on whether such processes shed any light on acceptable low energy effective theories of QCD.