The cool potential of gluons

Abstract

We put forward the idea that the quark-gluon plasma might exist way below the usual confinement temperature $T_c$. Our argument rests on the possibility that the plasma produced in heavy-ion collisions could reach a transient quasi-equilibrium with `over-occupied' gluon density, as advocated by Blaizot et al. Taking further into account that gluons acquire an effective mass by interaction effects, they can have a positive chemical potential and therefore behave similarly to non-relativistic bosons. Relevant properties of this dense state of interacting gluons, which we dub serried glue, can then be inferred on rather general grounds from Maxwell's relation.

Contribution to the Proceedings of the Conference "Strangeness in Quark Matter", July 6-11, 2015, Dubna, Russia