Three-phase description of strongly interacting matter

Abstract

Deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration are studied phenomenologically in the framework of a simple three-phase model. The hard-core repulsion between nucleons is taken into account by using an excluded volume approximation in a reformulated way. The phase consisting of coloured quarks of constituent mass, and of massless pions, is used to describe the deconfined but not yet chirally symmetric matter. The phase diagram in the plane of temperature and Gibbs free energy per particle is constructed. The separate phase transitions for deconfinement and restoration of chiral symmetry are indicated in the region of high temperature and low baryon number density.