No Arabic abstract
We study the phase diagram of two-flavor massless two-color QCD (QC$_2$D) under the presence of quark chemical potentials and imaginary isospin chemical potentials. At the special point of the imaginary isospin chemical potential, called the isospin Roberge--Weiss (RW) point, two-flavor QC$_2$D enjoys the $mathbb{Z}_2$ center symmetry that acts on both quark flavors and the Polyakov loop. We find a $mathbb{Z}_2$ t Hooft anomaly of this system, which involves the $mathbb{Z}_2$ center symmetry, the baryon-number symmetry, and the isospin chiral symmetry. Anomaly matching, therefore, constrains the possible phase diagram at any temperatures and quark chemical potentials at the isospin RW point, and we compare it with previous results obtained by chiral effective field theory and lattice simulations. We also point out an interesting similarity of two-flavor massless QC$_2$D with $(2+1)$d quantum anti-ferromagnetic systems.
We study the mixed anomaly between the discrete chiral symmetry and general baryon-color-flavor (BCF) backgrounds in $SU(N_c)$ gauge theories with $N_f$ flavors of Dirac fermions in representations ${cal R}_c$ of $N$-ality $n_c$, formulated on non-spin manifolds. We show how to study these theories on $mathbb{CP}^2$ by turning on general BCF fluxes consistent with the fermion transition functions. We consider several examples in detail and argue that matching the anomaly on non-spin manifolds places stronger constraints on the infrared physics, compared to the ones on spin manifolds (e.g.~$mathbb{T}^4$). We also show how to consistently formulate various chiral gauge theories on non-spin manifolds.
We exploit analytic continuation to prolongate to the region of real chemical potentials the (pseudo)critical lines of QCD with two degenerate staggered fermions at nonzero temperature and quark or isospin density obtained in the region of imaginary chemical potentials. We determine the curvatures at zero chemical potential and quantify the deviation between the cases of finite quark and of finite isospin chemical potential. In both circumstances deviations from a quadratic dependence of the pseudocritical lines on the chemical potential are clearly seen. We try different extrapolations and, for the nonzero isospin chemical potential, confront them with the results of direct Monte Carlo simulations. We also find that, as for the finite quark chemical potential, an imaginary isospin chemical potential can strengthen the transition till turning it into strong first order.
We study the phase diagram of QCD at finite isospin density using two flavors of staggered quarks. We investigate the low temperature region of the phase diagram where we find a pion condensation phase at high chemical potential. We started a basic analysis of the spectrum at finite isospin density. In particular, we measured pion, rho and nucleon masses inside and outside of the pion condensation phase. In agreement with previous studies in two-color QCD at finite baryon density we find that the Polyakov loop does not depend on the density in the staggered formulation.
The confinement-deconfinement transition is discussed from topological viewpoints. The topological change of the system is achieved by introducing the dimensionless imaginary chemical potential ($theta$). Then, the non-trivial free-energy degeneracy becomes the signal of the deconfinement transition and it can be visualized by using the map of the thermodynamic quantities to the circle $S^1$ along $theta$. To understand this topological deconfinement transition at finite real quark chemical potential ($mu_mathrm{R}$), we consider the isospin chemical potential ($mu_mathrm{iso}$) in the effective model of QCD. The phase diagram at finite $mu_mathrm{iso}$ is identical with that at finite $mu_mathrm{R}$ outside of the pion-condensed phase at least in the large-$N_mathrm{c}$ limit via the well-known orbifold equivalence. In the present effective model, the topological deconfinement transition does not show a significant dependence on $mu_mathrm{iso}$ and then we can expect that this tendency also appears at small $mu_mathrm{R}$. Also, the chiral transition and the topological deconfinement transition seems to be weakly correlated. If we will access lattice QCD data for the temperature dependence of the quark number density at finite $mu_mathrm{iso}$ with $theta=pi/3$, our surmise can be judged.
We investigate a higher-group structure of massless axion electrodynamics in $(3+1)$ dimensions. By using the background gauging method, we show that the higher-form symmetries necessarily have a global semistrict 3-group (2-crossed module) structure, and exhibit t Hooft anomalies of the 3-group. In particular, we find a cubic mixed t Hooft anomaly between 0-form and 1-form symmetries, which is specific to the higher-group structure.