Phenomenology of the three-flavor PNJL model and thermal strange quark production

We study the temperature dependence of the adjoint Polyakov loop and its implication for the momentum spectrum of gluons in the mean-field approximation. This allows us to calculate the contribution of the thermal (transverse) gluons to the thermodynamic pressure. As an application, we evaluate the rates for the strange quark pair-production processes $q\bar{q} \to s\bar{s}$ and $gg \to s\bar{s}$ as functions of temperature including thermal effects on quark deconfinement and chiral symmetry breaking.