On colour non-singlet representations of the quark–gluon system at finite temperature

Abstract.

We use a group theoretical technique to project out the partition function for a system of quarks, antiquarks and gluons onto a particular representation of the internal symmetry group SU(3): the colour singlet, colour octet and colour 27-plet, at finite temperature. We do this to calculate the thermodynamic quantities for those representations. We also calculate the change in free energy of the plasma droplet formed from the hot hadronic gas. We find that the size of the droplet in the colour-octet representation is smaller than that in the colour-singlet representations at different temperatures in the vicinity of the critical temperatures of the phase transitions.