Aspects of thermal strange quark production: the deconfinement and chiral phase transitions

We study the gluonic sector of the three-flavor PNJL model by obtaining the adjoint Polyakov loop and the gluon distribution function in the mean-field approximation. Besides, we explore the thermal strange quark pair-production processes, $q\bar {q} \to s\bar {s}$ and $gg \to s \bar {s}$, with the aid of the three-flavor PNJL model. The results help us identify the temperature where the gluonic contribution to the production rate becomes dominant, which is an innovative phenomenon compared with the result obtained in free perturbation theory.