No Arabic abstract
We investigate the phase structure of three-flavor QCD in the presence of finite quark chemical potential $mu/Tlesssim1.2$ by using the non-perturbatively $O(a)$ improved Wilson fermion action on lattices with a fixed temporal extent $N_{rm t}=6$ and varied spatial linear extents $N_{rm s}=8,10,12$. Especially, we focus on locating the critical end point that characterizes the phase structure, and extracting the curvature of the critical line on the $mu$-$m_{pi}$ plane. For Wilson-type fermions, the correspondence between bare parameters and physical parameters is indirect. Hence we present a strategy to transfer the bare parameter phase structure to the physical one, in order to obtain the curvature. Our conclusion is that the curvature is positive. This implies that, if one starts from a quark mass in the region of crossover at zero chemical potential, one would encounter a first-order phase transition when one raises the chemical potential.
We consider thermodynamic singularities appearing in the complex chemical potential plane in the vicinity of QCD critical point. In order to investigate what the singularities are like in a concrete form, we resort to an effective theory based on a mean field approach. We study the behavior of extrema of the real part of the complex effective potential in the complex order parameter plane.
We draw the three-flavor phase diagram as a function of light- and strange-quark masses for both zero and imaginary quark-number chemical potential, using the Polyakov-loop extended Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model with an effective four-quark vertex depending on the Polyakov loop. The model prediction is qualitatively consistent with 2+1 flavor lattice QCD prediction at zero chemical potential and with degenerate three-flavor lattice QCD prediction at imaginary chemical potential.
We determine the (pseudo)critical lines of QCD with two degenerate staggered fermions at nonzero temperature and quark or isospin density, in the region of imaginary chemical potentials; analytic continuation is then used to prolongate to the region of real chemical potentials. We obtain an accurate determination of the curvatures at zero chemical potential, quantifying the deviation between the case of finite quark and of finite isospin chemical potential. Deviations from a quadratic dependence of the pseudocritical lines on the chemical potential are clearly seen in both cases: we try different extrapolations and, for the case of nonzero isospin chemical potential, confront them with the results of direct Monte Carlo simulations. Finally we find that, as for the finite quark density case, an imaginary isospin chemical potential can strengthen the transition till turning it into strong first order.
We determine the continuum limit of the curvature of the pseudocritical line of QCD with $n_f$=2+1 staggered fermions at nonzero temperature and quark density. We perform Monte Carlo simulations at imaginary baryon chemical potentials, adopting the HISQ/tree action discretization, as implemented in the code by the MILC collaboration. Couplings are adjusted so as to move on a line of constant physics, as determined in Ref.~cite{Bazavov:2011nk}, with the strange quark mass $m_s$ fixed at its physical value and a light-to-strange mass ratio $m_l/m_s=1/20$. The chemical potential is set at the same value for the three quark species, $mu_l=mu_sequiv mu$. We attempt an extrapolation to the continuum using the results on lattices with temporal size up to $L_t=12$. Our estimate for the continuum value of the curvature $kappa$ at zero baryon density, $kappa=0.020(4)$, is compared with recent lattice results and with experimental determinations of the freeze-out curve.
We present results for the mass of the eta-prime meson in the continuum limit for two-flavor lattice QCD, calculated on the CP-PACS computer, using a renormalization-group improved gauge action, and Sheikholeslami and Wohlerts fermion action with tadpole-improved csw. Correlation functions are measured at three values of the coupling constant beta corresponding to the lattice spacing a approx. 0.22, 0.16, 0.11 fm and for four values of the quark mass parameter kappa corresponding to mpi over mrho approx. 0.8, 0.75, 0.7 and 0.6. For each beta, kappa pair, 400-800 gauge configurations are used. The two-loop diagrams are evaluated using a noisy source method. We calculate eta-prime propagators using local sources, and find that excited state contributions are much reduced by smearing. A full analysis for the smeared propagators gives metaprime=0.960(87)+0.036-0.248 GeV, in the continuum limit, where the second error represents the systematic uncertainty coming from varying the functional form for chiral and continuum extrapolations.