Quasiparticles in QCD thermodynamics and applications

We propose a novel quasiparticle interpretation of the equation of state of deconfined QCD at finite temperature. Using appropriate thermal masses, we introduce a phenomenological parametrization of the onset of confinement in the vicinity of the phase transition. Lattice results of the energy density, the pressure and the interaction measure of pure SU(3) gauge theory are well reproduced. A relation between the thermal energy density of the Yang-Mills vacuum and the chromomagnetic condensate _T is found. We also present the two flavour QCD equation of state for realistic quark masses and apply the model to dilepton production in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions.