Nonequilibrium parton dynamics in the strongly interacting QGP

Abstract

The dynamics of partons, hadrons and strings in relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions is analyzed within the novel Parton-Hadron-String Dynamics (PHSD) transport approach, which is based on a dynamical quasiparticle model for partons (DQPM) matched to reproduce recent lattice-QCD results—including the partonic equation of state—in thermodynamic equilibrium. The transition from partonic to hadronic degrees of freedom is described by covariant transition rates for the fusion of quark-antiquark pairs or three quarks (antiquarks), respectively, obeying flavor current-conservation, color neutrality as well as energymomentum conservation. Since the dynamical quarks and antiquarks become very massive close to the phase transition, the formed resonant ‘pre-hadronic’ color-dipole states (q\(\bar q\) or qqq) are of high invariant mass, too, and sequentially decay to the groundstate meson and baryon octets increasing the total entropy. When applying the PHSD approach to Pb + Pb colllisions at 158 A GeV we find a significant effect of the partonic phase on the production of multi-strange antibaryons due to a slightly enhanced s\(\bar q\) pair production from massive time-like gluon decay and a larger formation of antibaryons in the hadronization process.