Effect of Different SU(3) Color Representations on the Nucleation of Quark-Gluon Plasma Droplets from a Hadronic Gas

Abstract

We study the nucleation of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) droplets from the hadronic gas phase, based on the calculation of the difference in free energy in the QGP and hadronic gas phases. We investigate this difference in free energy by modeling it in different cases, when the surface tension of the QGP bubble is considered or not. We calculate the free energies of both hadronic gas consisting of massive pions and plasma droplet with up, down and strange quarks additionally to gluons, for different SU (3) color representations of the QGP, namely the color singlet, color octet, and color 27-plet. The behavior of the obtained change in free energy is examined with varying radius of the QGP bubble, and at different temperatures. The effect of the surface contribution on the nucleated bubble is also investigated and compared to the case without this contribution.