The entropy of the QCD plasma

Abstract

Self-consistent approximations in terms of fully dressed propagators provide a simple expression for the entropy of an ultrarelativistic plasma, which isolates the contribution of the elementary excitations as a leading contribution. Further approximations, whose validity is checked on a soluble model involving a scalar field, allow us to calculate the entropy of the QCD plasma. We obtain an accurate description of lattice data for purely gluonic QCD, down to temperatures of about twice the transition temperature.