Lifetime of electric flux tubes near the QCD phase transition

Abstract

Electric flux tubes are a well-known attribute of the quantum chromodynamic (QCD) vacuum in which they manifest confinement of electric color charges. Recently, experimental results appeared which suggest that not only do those objects persist at temperatures $T\ensuremath{\approx}{T}_{c}$ near the QCD phase transitions, but their decay is suppressed and the resulting clusters in Au-Au collisions are larger than in $\mathit{pp}$ collisions (i.e., in vacuum). This correlates well with recent theoretical scenarios that view the QCD matter in the $T\ensuremath{\approx}{T}_{c}$ region as a dual-magnetic plasma dominated by color-magnetic monopoles. In this view, the flux tubes are stabilized by dual-magnetic currents and are described by dual magnetohydrodynamics (DMHD). In this article, we calculate classically the dissipative effects in the flux tube. Such effects are associated with rescattering and finite conductivity of the matter. We derive the DMHD solution in the presence of dissipation and then estimate the lifetime of the electric flux tubes. The conclusion of this study is that a classical treatment leads to too short of a lifetime for the flux tubes.