On colour non-singlet representations of the quark-gluon system at finite temperature

We use a group theoretical technique to project out the partition function for a system of quarks, antiquarks and gluons onto a particular representat ion of the internal symmetry group SU(3): the colour singlet, colour octet and colour 27-plet, at finite temperature. We do this to calculate the ther modynamic quantities for those representations. We also calculate the chang e in free energy of the plasma droplet formed from the hot hadronic gas. We find that the size of the droplet in the colour-octet representation is sm aller than that in the colour-singlet representations at different temperat ures in the vicinity of the critical temperatures of the phase transitions.