In this talk we discuss the microscopic limit of QCD at nonzero chemical potential. In this domain, where the QCD partition function is under complete analytical control, we uncover an entirely new link between the spectral density of the Dirac operator and the chiral condensate: violent complex oscillations on the microscopic scale give rise to the discontinuity of the chiral condensate at zero quark mass. We first establish this relation exactly within a random matrix framework and then analyze the importance of the individual modes by Fourier analysis.
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