No Arabic abstract
We discuss the chiral phase transition of hot and dense quark matter. We illustrate that the first-order phase transition is generally favored at high baryon density and the repulsive vector-vector interaction weakens the first-order phase transition. We use the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model with the Polyakov loop coupling for concreteness. We locate the QCD critical surface on the quark mass plane for various values of the vector coupling constant. We find that, with increasing quark chemical potential, the first-order region in the quark mass plane could shrink for sufficiently large vector coupling. This may be a possible explanation for the recent lattice QCD results by de Forcrand and Philipsen.
We investigate vector meson spectral functions at finite temperature and density through the soft wall model, a bottom-up holographic approach to QCD. We find narrow resonances at small values of the parameters, becoming broader as temperature and density increase. We study dissociation of such states, occurring when no peak can be distinguished in the spectral function. We also find a decreasing of the mass of vector mesons at increasing temperature and density. Finally, a discussion of these results is presented.
We investigate probing the hot and dense nuclear matter with strange vector mesons ($K^*, bar{K}^*$). Our analysis is based on PHSD which incorporates partonic and hadronic dof and describes the full dynamics of HICs. This allows to study the $K^*$ and $bar{K}^*$ meson formation from the QGP and the in-medium effects related to the modification of their properties during the propagation in dense and hot matter. We employ relativistic Breit-Wigner spectral functions for the $K^*,bar{K}^*$ mesons with self-energies obtained from a G-matrix approach to study the role of in-medium effects on the $K^*$ and $bar{K}^*$ meson dynamics in HIC from FAIR/NICA to LHC energies. According to our analysis most of the final $K^*/bar{K}^*$s, that can be observed experimentally, are produced during the late hadronic phase and stem dominantly from the $K (bar{K}) + pi to K^*(bar{K}^*)$ formation channel. The amount of $K^*/bar{K}^*$s originating from the QGP channel is comparatively small even at LHC energies and such $K^*/bar{K}^*$s can hardly be reconstructed experimentally due to the rescattering of final pions and (anti-)kaons. This mirrors the results from our previous study on the strange vector-meson production in HICs at RHIC energies. The influence of the in-medium effects on the dynamics of the $K^*/bar{K}^*$ is rather small since they are mostly produced at low baryon densities. Additional cuts on the shape of the observed signal and the range of the invariant mass region of the $K^*/bar{K}^*$ also affect the final spectra. We demonstrate that the $K^*/bar{K}^*$ in-medium effects are more visible at lower beam energy, e.g. FAIR/NICA and BES RHIC energies, where the production of $K^*/bar{K}^*$s occurs at larger baryon densities. Finally, we present the experimental procedures to extract information on the in-medium masses and widths by fitting final mass spectra at LHC energies.
We investigate the response of dense and hot holographic QCD (hQCD) to a static and baryonic electric field E using the chiral model of Sakai and Sugimoto. Strong fields with E>(sqrtlambda M_{KK})^2 free quark pairs, causing the confined vacuum and matter state to decay. We generalize Schwingers QED persistence function to dense hQCD. At high temperature and density, Ohms law is derived generalizing a recent result by Karch and OBannon to the chiral case.
The 2-flavor Polyakov-loop extended model is generalized by taking into account the effective four-quark vector-type interaction with the coupling strengths, which are endowed with a dependence on the Polyakov field $Phi$. The effective vertex generates entanglement interaction between the Polyakov loop and the chiral condensate. We investigate the influence of an additional quark vector interaction and the entanglement interaction on the location of the critical end-point at the given chemical potential or quark density. It is shown that the finite value of the vector interaction strength $G_{rm v}$ improves the model agreement with the lattice data. The influence of the non-zero $G_{rm v}$ and entanglement on the thermodynamic observables and the curvature of the crossover boundary in the $T-mu$ plane is also examined.
Effects of the vector-type four-quark interaction on QCD phase structure are investigated in the imaginary chemical potential region, by using the Polyakov-loop extended Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (PNJL) model with the extended Z3 symmetry. In the course to this end, we clarify analytically the Roberge-Weiss periodicity and symmetry properties of various quantities under the existence of a vector-type four-quark interaction. In the imaginary chemical potential region, the chiral condensate and the quark number density are sensitive to the strength of the interaction. Based on this result, we propose a possibility to determine the strength of the vector-type interaction, which largely affects QCD phase structure in the real chemical potential region, by comparing the results of lattice simulations and effective model calculations in the imaginary chemical potential region.