We analyze the phase diagram of quantum chromodynamics at low-to-moderate temperature, baryon chemical potential and external magnetic field within chiral perturbation theory at next-to-leading order of the derivative expansion. Our main result is that the anomaly-induced chiral soliton lattice (CSL) phase is stabilized by thermal fluctuations. As a consequence, the CSL state may survive up to temperatures at which chiral symmetry is restored.
What happens to the QCD vacuum when a time-periodic circularly polarized laser field with a sufficiently large intensity and frequency is applied? Based on the Floquet formalism for periodically driven systems and the systematic low-energy effective theory of QCD, we show that for a sufficiently large frequency and above a critical intensity, the QCD vacuum is unstable against the chiral soliton lattice of pions, a crystalline structure of topological solitons that spontaneously breaks parity and continuous translational symmetries. In the chiral limit, in particular, the QCD vacuum is found unstable by the laser with an arbitrary small intensity. Our work would pave the way for novel Floquet vacuum engineering.
We study the chiral magnetic effect (CME) in the hadronic phase. The CME current involves pseudoscalar mesons to modify its functional form. This conclusion is independent of microscopic details. The strength of the CME current in the hadronic phase would decrease for two flavors.
We construct the effective potential for a QCD-like theory using the auxiliary field method. The chiral phase transition exhibited by the model at finite temperature and the quark chemical potential is studied from the viewpoint of the shape change of the potential near the critical point. We further generalize the effective potential so as to have quark number and scalar quark densities as independent variables near the tri-critical point.
In simulations with dynamical quarks it has been established that the ground state rho in the infrared is a strong mixture of the two chiral representations (0,1)+(1,0) and (1/2,1/2)_b. Its angular momentum content is approximately the 3S1 partial wave which is consistent with the quark model. Effective chiral restoration in an excited rho-meson would require that in the infrared this meson couples predominantly to one of the two representations. The variational method allows one to study the mixing of interpolators with different chiral transformation properties in the non-perturbatively determined excited state at different resolution scales. We present results for the first excited state of the rho-meson using simulations with n_f=2 dynamical quarks. We point out, that in the infrared a leading contribution to rho= rho(1450) comes from (1/2,1/2)_b, in contrast to the rho. Its approximate chiral partner would be a h_1(1380) state. The rho wave function contains a significant contribution of the 3D1 wave which is not consistent with the quark model prediction.
We present a lattice QCD based determination of the chiral phase transition temperature in QCD with two degenerate, massless quarks and a physical strange quark mass. We propose and calculate two novel estimators for the chiral transition temperature for several values of the light quark masses, corresponding to Goldstone pion masses in the range of $58~{rm MeV}lesssim m_pilesssim 163~{rm MeV}$. The chiral phase transition temperature is determined by extrapolating to vanishing pion mass using universal scaling analysis. Finite volume effects are controlled by extrapolating to the thermodynamic limit using spatial lattice extents in the range of $2.8$-$4.5$ times the inverse of the pion mass. Continuum extrapolations are carried out by using three different values of the lattice cut-off, corresponding to lattices with temporal extent $N_tau=6, 8$ and $12$. After thermodynamic, continuum and chiral extrapolations we find the chiral phase transition temperature $T_c^0=132^{+3}_{-6}$ MeV.