The Dirac spectrum of QCD with dynamical fermions at nonzero chemical potential is characterized by three regions, a region with a constant eigenvalue density, a region where the eigenvalue density shows oscillations that grow exponentially with the volume and the remainder of the complex plane where the eigenvalue density is zero. In this paper we derive the phase diagram of the Dirac spectrum from a chiral Lagrangian. We show that the constant eigenvalue density corresponds to a pion condensed phase while the strongly oscillating region is given by a kaon condensed phase. The normal phase with nonzero chiral condensate but vanishing Bose condensates coincides with the region of the complex plane where there are no eigenvalues.
The relation between the spectral density of the QCD Dirac operator at nonzero baryon chemical potential and the chiral condensate is investigated. We use the analytical result for the eigenvalue density in the microscopic regime which shows oscillations with a period that scales as 1/V and an amplitude that diverges exponentially with the volume $V=L^4$. We find that the discontinuity of the chiral condensate is due to the whole oscillating region rather than to an accumulation of eigenvalues at the origin. These results also extend beyond the microscopic regime to chemical potentials $mu sim 1/L$.
Lattice QCD at finite chemical potential is difficult due to the sign problem. We use stochastic quantization and complex Langevin dynamics to study this issue. First results for QCD in the hopping expansion are encouraging. U(1) and SU(3) one link models are used to gain further insight into why the method appears to be successful.
We determine the phase diagram of QCD on the mu-T plane for small to moderate chemical potentials. Two transition lines are defined with two quantities, the chiral condensate and the strange quark number susceptibility. The calculations are carried out on N_t =6,8 and 10 lattices generated with a Symanzik improved gauge and stout-link improved 2+1 flavor staggered fermion action using physical quark masses. After carrying out the continuum extrapolation we find that both quantities result in a similar curvature of the transition line. Furthermore, our results indicate that in leading order the width of the transition region remains essentially the same as the chemical potential is increased.
The microscopic spectral density of the QCD Dirac operator at nonzero baryon chemical potential for an arbitrary number of quark flavors was derived recently from a random matrix model with the global symmetries of QCD. In this paper we show that these results and extensions thereof can be obtained from the replica limit of a Toda lattice equation. This naturally leads to a factorized form into bosonic and fermionic QCD-like partition functions. In the microscopic limit these partition functions are given by the static limit of a chiral Lagrangian that follows from the symmetry breaking pattern. In particular, we elucidate the role of the singularity of the bosonic partition function in the orthogonal polynomials approach. A detailed discussion of the spectral density for one and two flavors is given.
In this contribution we investigate the phase diagram of QCD in the presence of an isospin chemical potential. To alleviate the infrared problems of the theory associated with pion condensation, we introduce the pionic source as an infrared regulator. We discuss various methods to extrapolate the results to vanishing pionic source, including a novel method based on the singular value spectrum of the massive Dirac operator, a leading-order reweighting and a spline Monte-Carlo fit. Our main results concern the phase transition boundary between the normal and the pion condensation phases and the chiral/deconfinement transition temperature as a function of the chemical potential. In addition, we perform a quantitative comparison between our direct results and a Taylor-expansion obtained at zero chemical potential to assess the applicability range of the latter.