Hot nuclear matter in the modified quark-meson coupling model with quark-quark correlations

Abstract

Short-range quark-quark correlations in hot nuclear matter are examined within the modified quark-meson coupling model (MQMC) by adding repulsive scalar and vector quark-quark interactions. Without these correlations, the bag radius increases with the baryon density. However when the correlations are introduced the bag size shrinks as the bags overlap. Also as the strength of the scalar quark-quark correlation is increased, the decrease of the effective nucleon mass $M^{*}_N$ with the baryonic density is slowed down and tends to saturate at high densities. Within this model we study the phase transition from the baryon-meson phase to the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) phase with the latter modeled as an ideal gas of quarks and gluons inside a bag. Two models for the QGP bag parameter are considered. In one case, the bag is taken to be medium-independent and the phase transition from the hadron phase to QGP is found to occur at 5-8 times ordinary nuclear matter density for temperatures less than 60 MeV. For lower densities, the transition takes place at higher temperature reaching up to 130 MeV at zero density. In the second case, the QGP bag parameter is considered medium-dependent as in the MQMC model for the hadronic phase. In this case, it is found that the phase transition occurs at much lower densities.