Schematic model for QCD. II. Finite temperature regime

Abstract

A schematic model for QCD, developed in a previous paper, is applied to calculate meson properties in the high temperature (up to 0.5 GeV) regime. It is a Lipkin model for quark-antiquark pairs coupled to gluon pairs of spin zero. The partition function is constructed with the obtained meson spectrum and several thermodynamical observables are calculated, such as the energy density, heat capacity, as well as relative production rates of mesons and absolute production rates for pions and kaons. The model predictions show a qualitative agreement with data. Based on these results, we advocate the use of the model as a toy model for QCD.