Thermal effects on sound velocity peak and conformality in isospin QCD

We study thermal effects on equations of state (EOS) in isospin QCD, utilizing a quark-meson model coupled to a Polyakov loop. The quark-meson model is analyzed at one-loop that is the minimal order to include quark substructure constraints on pions which condense at finite isospin density. In the previous study we showed that the quark-meson model at zero temperature produces the sound velocity peak and the negative trace anomaly in the domain between the chiral effective theory regime at low density and the perturbative QCD regime at high density, in reasonable agreement with lattice simulations. We now include thermal effects from quarks in the Polyakov loop background and examine EOS, especially the sound velocity and trace anomaly along isentropic trajectories. At large isospin density, there are three temperature windows; (i) the pion condensed region with almost vanishing Polyakov loops, (ii) the pion condensed region with finite Polyakov loops, and (iii) the quark gas without pion condensates. In the domain (i), the gap associated with the pion condensate strongly quenches thermal excitations. As the system approaches the domain (ii), thermal quarks, which behave as nonrelativistic particles, add energy density but little pressure, substantially reducing the sound velocity to the value less than the conformal value while increasing the trace anomaly toward the positive value. Approaching the domain (iii), thermal quarks become more relativistic as pion condensates melt, increasing sound velocity toward the conformal limit. Corrections from thermal pions are also briefly discussed. Published by the American Physical Society 2024