The quark–gluon–pion plasma

While it is commonly believed that there is a direct transition from the hadronic to a quark–gluon phase at high temperature, it would be prejudicial to rule out a sequence of dynamically generated intermediate scales. Using as guide, an effective Lagrangian with unconfined gluons and constituent quarks, interacting with a chiral multiplet, we examine a scenario in which the system undergoes first-order transitions at Tcomp, the compositeness scale of the pions, at Tχ, the scale for spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, and at Tc, the confinement temperature. We find that at current energies, it is likely that the formation temperature of the plasma, T0