De-Confinement and Clustering of Color Sources in Nuclear Collisions

Abstract

A brief introduction of the relationship of string percolation to the Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD) phase diagram is presented. The behavior of the Polyakov loop close to the critical temperature is studied in terms of the color fields inside the clusters of overlapping strings, which are produced in high energy hadronic collisions. The non-Abelian nature of the color fields implies an enhancement of the transverse momentum and a suppression of the multiplicities relative to the non overlapping case. The prediction of this framework are compared with experimental results from the SPS, RHIC and LHC for $pp$ and AA collisions. Rapidity distributions, probability distributions of transverse momentum and multiplicities, Bose-Einstein correlations, elliptic flow and ridge structures are used to evaluate these comparison. The thermodynamical quantities, the temperature, and energy density derived from RHIC and LHC data and Color String Percolation Model (CSPM) are used to obtain the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio ($\eta/s$). It was observed that the inverse of ($\eta/s$) represents the trace anomaly $\Delta =(\varepsilon-3P)/T^{4}$. Thus the percolation approach within CSPM can be successfully used to describe the initial stages in high energy heavy ion collisions in the soft region in high energy heavy ion collisions. The thermodynamical quantities, temperature and the equation of state are in agreement with the lattice QCD calculations. Thus the clustering of color sources has a clear physical basis although it cannot be deduced directly from QCD.