No Arabic abstract
We estimate the axion properties i.e. its mass, topological susceptibility and the self-coupling within the framework of Polyakov loop enhanced Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (PNJL) model at finite temperature and quark chemical potential. PNJL model, where quarks couple simultaneously to the chiral condensate and to a background temporal quantum chromodynamics (QCD) gauge field, includes two important features of QCD phase transition, i.e. deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration. The Polyakov loop in PNJL model plays an important role near the critical temperature. We have shown significant difference in the axion properties calculated in PNJL model compared to the same obtained using Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model. We find that both the mass of the axion and its self-coupling are correlated with the chiral transition as well as the confinement-deconfinement transition. We have also estimated the axion properties at finite chemical potential. Across the QCD transition temperature and/or quark chemical potential axion mass and its self-coupling also changes significantly. Since the PNJL model includes both the fermionic sector and the gauge fields, it can give reliable estimates of the axion properties, i.e. its mass and the self-coupling in a hot and dense QCD medium. We also compare our results with the lattice QCD results whenever available.
Nambu--Jona-Lasinio-type models have been used extensively to study the dynamics of the theory of the strong interaction at finite temperature and quark chemical potential on a phenomenological level. In addition to these studies, which are often performed under the assumption that the ground state of the theory is homogeneous, searches for the existence of crystalline phases associated with inhomogeneous ground states have attracted a lot of interest in recent years. In this work, we study the Polyakov-loop extended Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model and find that the existence of a crystalline phase is stable against a variation of the parametrization of the underlying Polyakov loop potential. To this end, we adopt two prominent parametrizations. Moreover, we observe that the existence of a quarkyonic phase depends crucially on the parametrization, in particular in the regime of the phase diagram where inhomogeneous chiral condensation is favored.
Thermodynamic properties of strongly interacting matter are investigated using the Polyakov loop enhanced Nambu$-$Jona-Lasinio model along with some modifications to include the hadrons. Various observables are shown to have a close agreement with the numerical data of QCD on lattice. The advantage of the present scheme over a similar study using a switching function is that here no extra parameters are to be fitted. As a result the present scheme can be easily extended for finite chemical potentials.
We study the interplay between the chiral and the deconfinement transitions, both at high temperature and high quark chemical potential, by a non local Nambu-Jona Lasinio model with the Polyakov loop in the mean field approximation and requiring neutrality of the ground state. We consider three forms of the effective potential of the Polyakov loop: two of them with a fixed deconfinement scale, cases I and II, and the third one with a $mu$ dependent scale, case III. In the cases I and II, at high chemical potential $mu$ and low temperature $T$ the main contribution to the free energy is due to the Z(3)-neutral three-quark states, mimicking the quarkyonic phase of the large $N_c$ phase diagram. On the other hand in the case III the quarkyonic window is shrunk to a small region. Finally we comment on the relations of these results to lattice studies and on possible common prospects. We also briefly comment on the coexistence of quarkyonic and color superconductive phases.
We investigate the phase diagram of the so-called Polyakov--Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model at finite temperature and nonzero chemical potential with three quark flavours. Chiral and deconfinement phase transitions are discussed, and the relevant order-like parameters are analyzed. The results are compared with simple thermodynamic expectations and lattice data. A special attention is payed to the critical end point: as the strength of the flavour-mixing interaction becomes weaker, the critical end point moves to low temperatures and can even disappear.
The effects of meson fluctuations are studied in a nonlocal generalization of the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model, by including terms of next-to-leading order (NLO) in 1/N_c. In the model with only scalar and pseudoscalar interactions NLO contributions to the quark condensate are found to be very small. This is a result of cancellation between virtual mesons and Fock terms, which occurs for the parameter sets of most interest. In the quark self-energy, similar cancellations arise in the tadpole diagrams, although not in other NLO pieces which contribute at the sim 25% level. The effects on pion properties are also found to be small. NLO contributions from real $pipi$ intermediate states increase the sigma meson mass by $sim 30%$. In an extended model with vector and axial interactions, there are indications that NLO effects could be larger.