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Unraveling the effect of rotation on the confinement/deconfinement transition of the quark-gluon plasma

Nelson R. F. Braga* and Alexsandre L. Ferreira, Jr.†

  • *Contact author: braga@if.ufrj.br
  • †Contact author: alexsandrej@if.ufrj.br
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 014029 – Published 16 July, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/lkvv-gmql

Abstract

There is an apparent contradiction in the current literature about the effect of rotation in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). While results from lattice QCD predict an increase in the confinement/deconfinement critical temperature, approximated calculations, and effective models, including holographic ones, lead to the opposite result. Noncentral heavy ion collisions form QGPs with relativistic rotational velocities. Thereby, a great interest was drawn into the effect of rotation in strongly interacting matter. In this work, we show that the apparent contradiction is associated with the choices of the observer considered in each case. We consider a holographic description of a rotating plasma using a Myers-Perry black hole. For a static observer, the result is that the confinement/deconfinement temperature decreases with the angular velocity, while for an observer corotating with the plasma the opposite behavior is found, in agreement with lattice calculations.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 014029– Published 16 July, 2026
  • Received 3 December 2025
  • Accepted 15 June 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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