Theoretical physicists from the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics at JINR, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Institute for High Energy Physics of Kurchatov Institute, the University of Tours (France), and Stockholm University (Sweden) conducted a study on the negativity of the moment of inertia of (quark-)gluon plasma in a window of “supervortical” range of temperatures above the deconfining phase transition, 𝑇≃(1…1.5)𝑇𝑐, found recently in numerical Monte Carlo simulations by two independent methods.

In this work, the authors numerically confirm that the origin of this effect is the thermal evaporation of the nonperturbative chromomagnetic condensate.

The scientific team argues that the negative moment of inertia of gluon plasma indicates the presence of a novel effect, the negative spin-vortical coupling for gluons resulting in a negative gluonic Barnett effect: the spin polarisation of gluons exceeds the total angular momentum of rotating plasma, thus forcing the orbital angular momentum to take negative values in the supervortical range of temperatures.

Physical Review D published an article about this study in July 2024. Among the authors are JINR employees Victor Braguta, Artem Roenko, and Dmitrii Sychev.