Thermodynamics of an exactly solvable confining quark model

Abstract

The grand partition function of a model of confined quarks is exactly calculated at arbitrary temperatures and quark chemical potentials. The model is inspired by a softly BRST-broken version of QCD and possesses a quark mass function compatible with nonperturbative analyses of lattice simulations and Dyson-Schwinger equations. Even though the model is defined at tree level, we show that it produces a nontrivial and stable thermodynamic behaviour at any temperature or chemical potential. Results for the pressure, the entropy and the trace anomaly as a function of the temperature are qualitatively compatible with the effect of nonperturbative interactions as observed in lattice simulations. The finite density thermodynamics is also shown to contain nontrivial features, being far away from an ideal gas picture.