Finite-Size Scaling of Thermal Susceptibility and Specific Heat Density Near the QCD Deconfinement Phase Transition
Abstract
The properties of the thermally driven deconfinement phase transition (DPT) from a hadronic gas (HG) to a color-singlet quark-gluon plasma (QGP) containing gluons and massless up and down quarks, at a nonzero quark chemical potential μ, are investigated by considering the volumetric coexistence of the hadronic gas and the QGP in a finite-size system. Finite-size effects are analyzed for the thermally driven DPT at different μ values. The critical exponents are determined using a numerical finite-size scaling (FSS) analysis, by fitting the results as a function of the system size. The effective transition temperature (Tc) exhibits a shift toward higher values as the system size decreases, indicating a critical behavior in the region of the thermally driven DPT from a HG to the QGP. Crucially, all three scaling critical exponents are found to be independent of the quark chemical potential μ, establishing the universality of the finite-size scaling structure with respect to μ.
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