No Arabic abstract
In this lecture we discuss various properties of the phase factor of the fermion determinant for QCD at nonzero chemical potential. Its effect on physical observables is elucidated by comparing the phase diagram of QCD and phase quenched QCD and by illustrating the failure of the Banks-Casher formula with the example of one-dimensional QCD. The average phase factor and the distribution of the phase are calculated to one-loop order in chiral perturbation theory. In quantitative agreement with lattice QCD results, we find that the distribution is Gaussian with a width $sim mu T sqrt V$ (for $m_pi ll T ll Lambda_{rm QCD}$). Finally, we introduce, so-called teflon plated observables which can be calculated accurately by Monte Carlo even though the sign problem is severe.
We investigate the properties of QCD at finite isospin chemical potential at zero and non-zero temperatures. This theory is not affected by the sign problem and can be simulated using Monte-Carlo techniques. With increasing isospin chemical potential and temperatures below the deconfinement transition the system changes into a phase where charged pions condense, accompanied by an accumulation of low modes of the Dirac operator. The simulations are enabled by the introduction of a pionic source into the action, acting as an infrared regulator for the theory, and physical results are obtained by removing the regulator via an extrapolation. We present an update of our study concerning the associated phase diagram using 2+1 flavours of staggered fermions with physical quark masses and the comparison to Taylor expansion. We also present first results for our determination of the equation of state at finite isospin chemical potential and give an example for a cosmological application. The results can also be used to gain information about QCD at small baryon chemical potentials using reweighting with respect to the pionic source parameter and the chemical potential and we present first steps in this direction.
We present results for the phase diagram of QCD with two massless quark flavours as obtained from a first-principles functional renormalisation group approach. In particular we compute order parameters for chiral symmetry breaking and quark confinement at vanishing and non-zero imaginary chemical potential. Our analytical and numerical results suggest a close relation between the chiral and the deconfinement phase transition. We discuss the properties of dual order parameters at imaginary and real chemical potential.
We provide the most accurate results for the QCD transition line so far. We optimize the definition of the crossover temperature $T_c$, allowing for its very precise determination, and extrapolate from imaginary chemical potential up to real $mu_B approx 300$ MeV. The definition of $T_c$ adopted in this work is based on the observation that the chiral susceptibility as a function of the condensate is an almost universal curve at zero and imaganiary $mu_B$. We obtain the parameters $kappa_2=0.0153(18)$ and $kappa_4=0.00032(67)$ as a continuum extrapolation based on $N_t=10,12$ and $16$ lattices with physical quark masses. We also extrapolate the peak value of the chiral susceptibility and the width of the chiral transition along the crossover line. In fact, both of these are consistent with a constant function of $mu_B$. We see no sign of criticality in the explored range.
We study genuine finite density effects in QCD-like theories with three-dimensional Polyakov-loop effective theories for heavy quarks. These are derived from the full QCD-like theories by combined strong-coupling and hopping expansions. In particular, we investigate the cold and dense regimes of phase diagrams where we expect to find Bose-Einstein-condensation of diquark baryons or a fermionic first-order liquid-gas transition, depending on the gauge group of the theory. In two-color QCD, for example, we observe evidence of a continuous zero-temperature transition to finite diquark density when the quark chemical potential $mu$ reaches half the diquark mass, i.e. without binding energy. In G$_2$-QCD we observe, in addition to this Silver Blaze onset of diquark density, a second transition in the density towards an exponential increase by roughly $3mu/T$ corresponding to a finite density of G$_2$-nucleons.
We investigate the real and imaginary chemical-potential dependence of pion and $rho$-meson screening masses in both the confinement and the deconfinement region by using two-flavor lattice QCD. The spatial meson correlators are calculated in the imaginary chemical potential region with lattice QCD simulations. We extract pion and $rho$-meson screening masses from the correlators. The obtained meson screening masses are extrapolated to the real chemical potential region by assuming some analytic function. In the real chemical potential region, the resulting pion and $rho$-meson screening masses monotonically increase as real chemical potential becomes large.