Daniel Zabłocki

Generalised Beth-Uhlenbeck description for the hadron-to-quark matter transition

A microscopic description of the equation of state for dense hadronic matter including the phase transition to quark matter is a long standing problem relevant for cosmology,heavy-ion collisions and the astrophysics of compact stars and supernovae. Traditional approaches construct a phase transition from separately given models for hadronic and quark matter phases. They cannot be trusted in the phase transition region and fail to predict a critical point in the phase diagram. Functional renormalization group approaches based on effective chiral Lagrangians improve the situation substantially but are not yet developed to describe hadrons as composite particles and thus cannot address the effects of bound state dissociation, such as the role of continuum correlations in the vicinity of the phase transition. We report recent progress in deriving and solving a generalised Beth-Uhlenbeck equation of state for quark matter with mesonic and baryonic correlations that does not suffer from these problems.