Glueballs, gluon condensate, and pure glue QCD below T_c

Abstract

A quasiparticle description of pure glue QCD thermodynamics at T<T_c is proposed and compared to recent lattice data. Given that a gas of glueballs with constant mass cannot quantitatively reproduce the early stages of the deconfinement phase transition, the problem is to identify a relevant mechanism leading to the observed sudden increase of the pressure, trace anomaly, etc. It is shown that the strong decrease of the gluon condensate near T_c combined with the increasing thermal width of the lightest glueballs might be the trigger of the phase transition.

Comments: 5 pages, 5 figures; analysis refined in v2, explanations added; v3 to appear in EPJC