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On the nature of thermal QCD phase transitions

Yoshitaka Hatta·Kenji Fukushima
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Abstract

We argue that the chiral phase transition and the deconfinement phase transition in finite temperature QCD are just different limits of a single crossover phase transition driven by the lightest scalar field which is a mixture of the glueball and the sigma meson. The key mechanism, the level repulsion between the sigma and the glueball, gives not only a unified description of the finite temperature phase transitions, but also a consistent characterization of the entire QCD phase diagram in the temperature-quark mass plane.

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Yoshitaka Hatta, Kenji Fukushima. 2003-11-21. On the nature of thermal QCD phase transitions. https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0311267

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