Thermodynamics of Hot Hadronic Gases at Finite Baryon Densities

Abstract

In this thesis we investigate equilibrium and nonequilibrium thermodynamic properties of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) matter at finite baryon densities. We begin by constructing crossover models for the thermodynamic equation of state. These use switching functions to smoothly interpolate between a hadronic gas model at low energy densities to a perturbative QCD equation of state at high energy densities. We carefully design the switching function to avoid introducing first-, second-, or higher-order phase transitions which lattice QCD indicates are not present at small baryon chemical potentials. We employ three kinds of hadronic models in the crossover constructions, two of which include repulsive interactions via an excluded volume approximation while one model does not. We find that the three crossover models are in excellent agreement with accurate lattice QCD calculations of the equation of state over a wide range of temperatures and baryon chemical potentials. Hence, the crossover models should be very useful for parameterizing the equation of state at finite baryon densities, which is needed to build next-generation hydrodynamic simulations of heavy-ion collisions. We next calculate the speed of sound and baryon number fluctuations predicted by the crossover models. We find that crossover models with hadronic repulsion are most successful at reproducing the lattice results, while the model without repulsion is less successful, and hadron (only) models show poor agreement. We then compare the crossover models to net-proton fluctuation measurements from the STAR Collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The comparisons suggest baryon number fluctuations freeze-out well below the chemical freeze-out temperature. We also search for signs of critical fluctuations in the STAR data, but we find no evidence for them at this time. Finally, we derive kinetic theory formulas for the shear and bulk viscosity and thermal conductivity of hot hadronic matter. This generalizes previous works by incorporating baryon chemical potential and a vector mean field into the formalism. We show that the theory is thermodynamically self-consistent and it obeys the Landau-Lifshitz conditions of fit. The formulas should be very useful for predicting transport coefficients in future heavy-ion collision experiments at RHIC and other colliders.