Phenomenology of the three-flavor PNJL model and thermal strange quark production

Abstract

We study the temperature dependence of the adjoint Polyakov loop and its implication for the momentum spectrum of gluons in the mean-field approximation. This allows us to calculate the contribution of the thermal (transverse) gluons to the thermodynamic pressure. As an application, we evaluate the rates for the strange quark pair-production processes $q\bar{q} \to s\bar{s}$ and $gg \to s\bar{s}$ as functions of temperature including thermal effects on quark deconfinement and chiral symmetry breaking.