Thermodynamics of the Glueball Resonance Gas

Abstract

We study the thermodynamic properties -- pressure, entropy and trace anomaly -- of a gas of glueballs that includes the glueball states obtained by various lattice simulations. We show that this model, called Glueball Resonance Gas (GRG) approach, describes well the thermal properties of the Yang-Mills sector of QCD below the critical temperature $T_c$, provided that $T_c$ is properly matched to the corresponding determination of the glueball masses, obtaining $T_c \sim 320 \pm 20$ MeV. The inclusion into the GRG of heavier glueballs not yet seen on the lattice, assuming that glueballs follow Regge trajectories as quark-antiquark states do, leads only to a small correction. We consider the contribution to the pressure of the interactions between scalar-scalar and tensor-tensor glueballs, which turn out to be also negligible.