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There are strong indications that ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions, produced in accelarators, lead to the formation of a new state of matter: the quark gluon plasma (QGP). This deconfined QCD matter is expected to exist just for very short times after the collision. All the information one can get about the plasma is obtained from the particles that reach the detectors. Among them, heavy vector mesons are particularly important. The abundance of cc and bb states produced in a heavy ion collision is a source of information about the plasma. In contrast to the light mesons, that completely dissociate when the plasma is formed, heavy mesons presumably undergo a partial thermal dissociation. The dissociation degree depends on the temperature and also on the presence of magnetic fields and on the density (chemical potential). So, in order to get information about the plasma out of the quarkonium abundance data, one needs to resort to models that provide the dependence of the dissociation degree on these factors. Holographic phenomenological models provide a nice description for charmonium and bottomonium quasi-states in a plasma. In particular, quasi-normal modes associated with quarkonia states have been studied recently for a plasma with magnetic fields. Here we extend this analysis of quasinormal models to the case when charmonium and bottomonium are inside a plasma with finite density. The complex frequencies obtained are then compared with a Breit Wigner approximation for the peaks of the corresponding thermal spectral functions, in order to investigate the quantitative agreement of the different descriptions of quarkonium quasi-states. *

No abstract

We construct a model for dense matter based on low-density nuclear matter properties that exhibits a chiral phase transition and that includes strangeness through hyperonic degrees of freedom. Empirical constraints from nuclear matter alone allow for various scenarios, from a strong first-order chiral transition at relatively low densities through a weaker transition at higher densities, even up to a smooth crossover not far beyond the edge of the allowed range. The model parameters can be chosen such that at asymptotically large densities the chirally restored phase contains strangeness and the speed of sound approaches the conformal limit, resulting in a high-density phase that resembles deconfined quark matter. Additionally, if the model is required to reproduce sufficiently massive compact stars, the allowed parameter range is significantly narrowed down, resulting for instance in a very narrow range for the poorly known slope parameter of the symmetry energy, L (88 − 92) MeV. We also find that for the allowed parameter range strangeness does not appear in the form of hyperons in the chirally broken phase and the chiral transition is of first order. Due to its unified approach and relative simplicity -here we restrict ourselves to zero temperature and the mean-field approximation -the model can be used in the future to study dense matter under compact star conditions in the vicinity of the chiral phase transition, for instance to compute the surface tension or to investigate spatially inhomogeneous phases.