Speaker
Description
We investigate the thermodynamics of heavy-quark QCD in the hopping-parameter expansion (HPE) in an analytic manner. We develop a procedure to calculate the grand potential of heavy-quark QCD in the HPE using a technique based on the cumulant expansion. Applying this method to the analysis of thermodynamics, we derive the formula for the grand potential expressed in terms of the cumulants of the Polyakov loop and loop operators with windings along the temporal direction. These results immediately lead to the fact that the ratio of quark-number cumulants at even orders is unity in the deconfined phase and nine in the confined phase at leading order in the HPE. We also explore properties of excitations carrying quark number in both phases, such as their excitation energies.
