We discuss the phases of QCD in the parameter space spanned by the number of light flavours and the temperature with respect to the realisation of chiral and conformal symmetries. The intriguing interplay of these symmetries is best studied by means of lattice simulations, and some selected results from our recent work are presented here.
We consider the noncommutative deformation of the Sakai--Sugimoto model at finite temperature and finite baryon chemical potential. The space noncommutativity is possible to have an influence on the flavor dynamics of the QCD. The critical temperature and critical value of the chemical potential are modified by the space noncommutativity. The influence of the space noncommutativity on the flavor dynamics of the QCD is caused by the Wess--Zumino term in the effective action of the D8-branes. The intermediate temperature phase, in which the gluons deconfine but the chiral symmetry remains broken, is easy to be realized in some region of the noncommutativity parameter.
In simulations with dynamical quarks it has been established that the ground state rho in the infrared is a strong mixture of the two chiral representations (0,1)+(1,0) and (1/2,1/2)_b. Its angular momentum content is approximately the 3S1 partial wave which is consistent with the quark model. Effective chiral restoration in an excited rho-meson would require that in the infrared this meson couples predominantly to one of the two representations. The variational method allows one to study the mixing of interpolators with different chiral transformation properties in the non-perturbatively determined excited state at different resolution scales. We present results for the first excited state of the rho-meson using simulations with n_f=2 dynamical quarks. We point out, that in the infrared a leading contribution to rho= rho(1450) comes from (1/2,1/2)_b, in contrast to the rho. Its approximate chiral partner would be a h_1(1380) state. The rho wave function contains a significant contribution of the 3D1 wave which is not consistent with the quark model prediction.
We perform numerical simulations of lattice QCD with two flavors of dynamical overlap quarks, which have exact chiral symmetry on the lattice. While this fermion discretization is computationally demanding, we demonstrate the feasibility to simulate reasonably large and fine lattices by a careful choice of the lattice action and algorithmic improvements. Our production runs are carried out on a 16^3 times 32 lattice at a single lattice spacing around 0.12 fm. We explore the sea quark mass region down to m_s/6, where m_s is the physical strange quark mass, for a good control of the chiral extrapolation in future calculations of physical observables. We describe in detail our setup and algorithmic properties of the production simulations and present results for the static quark potential to fix the lattice scale and the locality of the overlap operator.
Chiral symmetry is an essential concept in understanding QCD at low energy. We treat the chiral condensate, which measures the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry, as a free parameter to investigate the effect of partially restored chiral symmetry on the physical quantities in the frame work of an AdS/QCD model. We observe an interesting scaling behavior among the nucleon mass, pion decay constant and chiral condensate. We propose a phenomenological way to introduce the temperature dependence of a physical quantity in the AdS/QCD model with the thermal AdS metric.
The nature and location of the QCD phase transition close to the chiral limit restricts the phase structure of QCD with physical pion masses at non-vanishing density. At small pion masses, explicit $U(1)_{rm A}$-breaking, as induced by a non-trivial topological density, is of eminent importance. It triggers the t Hooft interactions and also manifests itself in the interplay of four-quark interactions at low momentum scales. In the present work, we perform a Fierz-complete analysis of the emergence of four-quark interactions from the QCD dynamics at finite temperature, subject to a given t Hooft coupling at large momentum scales. The variation of the latter allows us to test the robustness of our findings. Taking an estimate of the effect of the topological running of the t Hooft coupling into account, our analysis suggests that the chiral transition in QCD with two massless quark flavours falls into the $O(4)$ universality class.