Speaker
Description
In this talk, I will report our recent achievements on the thermodynamics of finite-temperature QCD matter under acceleration.
QCD Phase Transition under Acceleration
Various phases of QCD matter have been studied with external parameters such as temperature, density, magnetic field, and rotation. Recently, acceleration has also attracted attention as an additional axis of the QCD phase diagram. It is well known that the Minkowski vacuum state is perceived as a thermal state under acceleration, which leads to a critical acceleration for the confinement-deconfinement phase transition. This observation motivates us to ask how the properties of finite-temperature QCD matter are modified under acceleration.
Thermodynamics in Accelerated Systems
We investigate the one-loop Polyakov-loop potential for accelerated QCD matter. There are subtleties in calculating the free energy and pressure in accelerated systems: different calculation methods lead to apparently different results. Here, we calculated the free energy in three ways: by a direct calculation in the accelerated frame, by using the energy-momentum tensor (EMT) in the accelerated frame, and by a direct calculation in the optical frame obtained through a Weyl transformation. We found that the EMT-based calculation in the accelerated frame agrees with the calculation in the optical frame, while the direct calculation in the accelerated frame naturally corresponds to the pressure along the acceleration direction (which, in fact, differs from the negative of the free energy).
We also obtained the Polyakov-loop potential under acceleration. The potential becomes steeper as the acceleration increases, indicating that the system becomes more deconfined.