Eur. Phys. J. A (2016) 52: 186
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2016-16186-x

Letter

Glueball dynamics in the hot plasma

¹ Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 730000, Lanzhou, China
² Bogoliubov Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, 141980, Dubna, Moscow region, Russia

^* e-mail: kochelev@theor.jinr.ru

Received: 21 April 2016
Accepted: 16 June 2016
Published online: 18 July 2016

Abstract

We discuss the glueball contribution to the equation of state (EoS) of hot gluon matter below and above . We show that the strong variation of the masses of the scalar and pseudoscalar glueballs near is determining the thermodynamics of the SU(3) gauge theory. We provide arguments to justify that these glueballs become massless at , a phenomenon which is crucial to understand the mysterious behavior of the trace anomaly found in lattice calculations.