We consider the Polyakov loop-extended two flavor chiral quark--meson model and discuss critical phenomena related with the spontaneous breaking of the chiral symmetry. The model is explored beyond the mean-field approximation in the framework of the functional renormalisation group. We discuss properties of the net-quark number density fluctuations as well as their higher cumulants. We show that with the increasing net-quark number density, the higher order cumulants exhibit a strong sensitivity to the chiral crossover transition. We discuss their role as probes of the chiral phase transition in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and LHC.
We discuss the properties of hadronic fluctuations, i.e. fluctuations of net quark and isospin numbers as well as electric charge, in the vicinity of the QCD transition in isospin-symmetric matter at vanishing quark chemical potential. We analyse second- and fourth-order cumulants of these fluctuations and argue that the ratio of quartic and quadratic cumulants reflects the relevant degrees of freedom that carry the quark number, isospin or charge, respectively. In the hadronic phase we find that an enhancement of charge fluctuations arises from contributions of doubly charged hadrons to the thermodynamics. The rapid suppression of fluctuations seen in the high-temperature phase suggests that in the QGP, net quark number and electric charge are predominantly carried by quasi-particles, with the quantum numbers of quarks.
We study the thermodynamic curvature, $R$, around the chiral phase transition at finite temperature and chemical potential, within the quark-meson model augmented with meson fluctuations. We study the effect of the fluctuations, pions and $sigma$-meson, on the top of the mean field thermodynamics and how these affect $R$ around the crossover. We find that for small chemical potential the fluctuations enhance the magnitude of $R$, while they do not affect substantially the thermodynamic geometry in the proximity of the critical endpoint. Moreover, in agreement with previous studies we find that $R$ changes sign in the pseudocritical region, suggesting a change of the nature of interactions at the mesoscopic level from statistically repulsive to attractive. Finally, we find that in the critical region around the critical endpoint $|R|$ scales with the correlation volume, $|R| =K;xi^3$, with $K = O(1)$, as expected from hyperscaling; far from the critical endpoint the correspondence between $|R|$ and the correlation volume is not as good as the one we have found at large $mu$, which is not surprising because at small $mu$ the chiral crossover is quite smooth; nevertheless, we have found that $R$ develops a characteristic peak structure, suggesting that it is still capable to capture the pseudocritical behavior of the condensate.
We discuss the properties of fluctuations of the electric charge in the vicinity of the chiral crossover transition within effective chiral models at finite temperature and vanishing net baryon density. The calculation includes non-perturbative dynamics implemented within the functional renormalization group approach. We study the temperature dependence of the electric charge susceptibilities in the linear sigma model and explore the role of quantum statistics. Within the Polyakov loop extended quark-meson model, we study the influence of the coupling of quarks to mesons and to an effective gluon field on charge fluctuations. We find a clear signal for the chiral crossover transition in the fluctuations of the electric charge. Accordingly, we stress the role of higher order cumulants as probes of criticality related to the restoration of chiral symmetry and deconfinement.
We discuss the influence of fluctuations on thermodynamics near the chiral phase transition within Polyakov loop extended quark--meson model based on the functional renormalization group (FRG) method. We include the gluon fields in the FRG flow equation self-consistently on the mean-field level. We focus on the properties of the phase diagram and net-baryon number fluctuations.
We investigate the quark spectrum near but above the critical temperature of the chiral transition, taking into account the precursory soft modes. It is found that there appear novel excitation spectra of quasi-quarks and quasi-antiquarks with a three-peak structure. By a detailed analysis on the formation of the three-peak structure using Yukawa models, it is shown that the new quark spectra originate from the mixing between a quark (anti-quark) and an antiquark hole (quark hole) caused by a resonant scattering of the quasi-quark with the soft modes which have a small but finite excitation energy with a small width near the critical temperature.