Effect of mesonic off-shell correlations in the PNJL equation of state

Abstract

We study the meson contribution to the equation of state of the 2-flavor PNJL model, including the full momentum dependence of the meson polarization loops. Within the Beth-Uhlenbeck approach, we demonstrate that the contribution from the quark-antiquark continuum excitations in the spacelike region ${\omega }^2-q^2<0$, i.e. the Landau damping, leads to an increase of the pressure for temperatures $\gtrsim 0.8T_c^{\chi }$ and a significant meson momentum cut-off dependence in the mesonic pressure and the QCD trace anomaly. We investigate the dependence of the results on the choice of the Polyakov-loop potential parameter $T_0$. From the dependence of the mesonic pressure on the current quark mass, by means of the Feynman-Hellmann theorem, we evaluate the contribution of the pion quasiparticle gas and Landau damping to the chiral condensate.

Comments: 13 pages, 8 figures