The Lifetime of the Electric Flux Tubes near the QCD Phase Transition

Abstract

Electric flux tubes are a well known attribute of the QCD vacuum in which they manifest confinement of electric color charges. Recently, experimental results have appeared suggesting that not only those objects persist at temperatures $T\approx T_c$ near the QCD phase transitions, but their decay is suppressed and the resulting clusters in AuAu collisions are larger than in pp (i.e. in vacuum). This correlates well with recent theoretical scenarios that view the QCD matter in the $T\approx T_{c}$ 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 paper 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.