ON THE THERMODYNAMIC GEOMETRY OF HOT QCD

Abstract

We study the nature of the covariant thermodynamic geometry arising from the free energy of hot QCD. We systematically analyze the underlying equilibrium thermodynamic configurations of the free energy of two- and three-flavor hot QCD with or without the inclusion of thermal fluctuations in the neighborhood of the QCD transition temperature. We show that there exists a well-defined thermodynamic geometric notion for the QCD thermodynamics. The geometry thus obtained has no singularity as an intrinsic Riemannian manifold. We further show that there is a close connection of this geometric approach with the existing studies of correlations and quark number susceptibilities.