No Arabic abstract
We pursue the idea of adding the naive $mu N$ term, where $mu$ is the quark chemical potential and $N$ is the conserved quark number, to the lattice QCD action. While computations of higher order susceptibilities, required for estimating the location of the QCD critical point, need a lot fewer number of quark propagators at any order as a result, it has its problem. We discuss a solution, and examine if it works.
We present two new suggestions for density of states (DoS) approaches to finite density lattice QCD. Both proposals are based on the recently developed and successfully tested DoS FFA technique, which is a DoS approach for bosonic systems with a complex action problem. The two different implementations of DoS FFA we suggest for QCD make use of different representations of finite density lattice QCD in terms of suitable pseudo-fermion path integrals. The first proposal is based on a pseudo-fermion representation of the grand canonical QCD partition sum, while the second is a formulation for the canonical ensemble. We work out the details of the two proposals and discuss the results of exploratory 2-d test studies for free fermions at finite density, where exact reference data allow one to verify the final results and intermediate steps.
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 QCD equation of state at finite baryon density is studied in the framework of a Cluster Expansion Model (CEM), which is based on the fugacity expansion of the net baryon density. The CEM uses the two leading Fourier coefficients, obtained from lattice simulations at imaginary $mu_B$, as the only model input and permits a closed analytic form. Excellent description of the available lattice data at both $mu_B = 0$ and at imaginary $mu_B$ is obtained. We also demonstrate how the Fourier coefficients can be reconstructed from baryon number susceptibilities.
We investigate chemical-potential (mu) dependence of static-quark free energies in both the real and imaginary mu regions, performing lattice QCD simulations at imaginary mu and extrapolating the results to the real mu region with analytic continuation. Lattice QCD calculations are done on a 16^{3}times 4 lattice with the clover-improved two-flavor Wilson fermion action and the renormalization-group improved Iwasaki gauge action. Static-quark potential is evaluated from the Polyakov-loop correlation functions in the deconfinement phase. As the analytic continuation, the potential calculated at imaginary mu=imu_{rm I} is expanded into a Taylor-expansion series of imu_{rm I}/T up to 4th order and the pure imaginary variable imu_{rm I}/T is replaced by the real one mu_{rm R}/T. At real mu, the 4th-order term weakens mu dependence of the potential sizably. At long distance, all of the color singlet and non-singlet potentials tend to twice the single-quark free energy, indicating that the interactions between heavy quarks are fully color-screened for finite mu. For both real and imaginary mu, the color-singlet q{bar q} and the color-antitriplet qq interaction are attractive, whereas the color-octet q{bar q} and the color-sextet qq interaction are repulsive. The attractive interactions have stronger mu/T dependence than the repulsive interactions. The color-Debye screening mass is extracted from the color-singlet potential at imaginary mu, and the mass is extrapolated to real mu by analytic continuation. The screening mass thus obtained has stronger mu dependence than the prediction of the leading-order thermal perturbation theory at both real and imaginary mu.
We discuss two new DoS approaches for finite density lattice QCD. The paper extends a recent presentation of the new techniques based on Wilson fermions, while here we now discuss and test the case of finite density QCD with staggered fermions. The first of our two approaches is based on the canonical formulation where observables at a fixed net quark number $N$ are obtained as Fourier moments of the vacuum expectation values at imaginary chemical potential $theta$. We treat the latter as densities which can be computed with the recently developed FFA method. The second approach is based on a direct grand canonical evaluation after rewriting the QCD partition sum in terms of a suitable pseudo-fermion representation. In this form the imaginary part of the pseudo-fermion action can be identified and the corresponding density may again be computed with FFA. We develop the details of the two approaches and discuss some exploratory first tests for the case of free fermions where reference results for assessing the new techniques may be obtained from Fourier transformation.