Thermodynamic Geometry of Strongly Interacting Matter

Abstract

The thermodynamic geometry formalism is applied to strongly interacting matter to estimate the deconfinement temperature. The curved thermodynamic metric for Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is evaluated on the basis of lattice data, whereas the hadron resonance gas model is used for the hadronic sector. Since the deconfinement transition is a crossover, the geometric criterion used to define the \mbox{(pseudo-)critical} temperature, as a function of the baryonchemical potential ${\mu }_B$, is $R(T,{\mu }_B)=0$, where $R$ is the scalar curvature. The (pseudo-)critical temperature, $T_c$, resulting from QCD thermodynamic geometry is in good agreement with lattice and phenomenological freeze-out temperature estimates. The crossing temperature, $T_h$, evaluated by the hadron resonance gas, which suffers of some model dependence, is larger than $T_c$ (about $20\%$) signaling remnants of confinement above the transition.

Comments: 12 pages, 5 figs