Quest for the Degrees of Freedom in sQGP: An Electric-Magnetic Duality Perspective

Based on monopoles and generic E-M duality, we have recently suggested a ``magnetic scenario'' [PRC75:054907,2007] for quark-gluon plasma in 1-2$T_c$ region (known as sQGP) --- a plasma in which monopoles become light, weakly coupled, and dominant d.o.f near $T_c$, while electric particles (quarks and gluons) are forced to become heavy and strongly coupled, eventually confined. This picture has been supported by several independent lattice results. In particular our ``magnetic scenario'' predicted that electric/magnetic effective coupling should run in opposite direction as temperature changes. This was confirmed in our paper [arXiv:0804.0255[hep-ph]] by analyzing recent accurate data about lattice monopoles. As applications of the ``magnetic scenario'', we were able to show: (1) a strongly coupled plasma with equally mixed electric and magnetic charges has the desired transport properties very close to the ``perfect liquid'' observed at RHIC; (2) the dense monopole plasma at $T=(0.8-1.3)T_c$ could support metastable flux tubes between $\bar Q Q$ and allow us to explain the non-trivial $T$-dependence of the static $\bar Q Q$ potentials calculated on the lattice, see [Phys. Rev. C 77: 064905, 2008] and [arXiv:0804.4890 [hep-ph]].