No Arabic abstract
We examine the possibility that the physical spectrum of a vector-like gauge field theory exhibits an enhanced global symmetry near a chiral phase transition. A transition from the Goldstone phase to the symmetric phase is expected as the number of fermions N_f is increased to some critical value. Various investigations have suggested that a parity-doubled spectrum develops as the critical value is approached. Using an effective Lagrangian as a guide, we note that parity doubling is associated with the appearance of an enhanced global symmetry in the spectrum of the theory. The enhanced symmetry would develop as the spectrum splits into two sectors, with the first exhibiting the usual pattern of a spontaneously broken chiral symmetry, and the second exhibiting an additional, unbroken symmetry and parity doubling. The first sector includes the Goldstone bosons and other states such as massive scalar partners. The second includes a parity-degenerate vector and axial vector along with other possible parity partners. We note that if such a near-critical theory describes symmetry breaking in the electroweak theory, the additional symmetry suppresses the contribution of the parity doubled sector to the S parameter.
We study the production of entropy in the context of a nonequilibrium chiral phase transition. The dynamical symmetry breaking is modeled by a Langevin equation for the order parameter coupled to the Bjorken dynamics of a quark plasma. We investigate the impact of dissipation and noise on the entropy and explore the possibility of reheating for crossover and first-order phase transitions, depending on the expansion rate of the fluid. The relative increase in S/N is estimated to range from 10% for a crossover to 200% for a first-order phase transition at low beam energies, which could be detected in the pion-to-proton ratio as a function of beam energy.
We study the thermodynamic curvature, $R$, around the chiral phase transition at finite temperature and chemical potential, within the quark-meson model augmented with meson fluctuations. We study the effect of the fluctuations, pions and $sigma$-meson, on the top of the mean field thermodynamics and how these affect $R$ around the crossover. We find that for small chemical potential the fluctuations enhance the magnitude of $R$, while they do not affect substantially the thermodynamic geometry in the proximity of the critical endpoint. Moreover, in agreement with previous studies we find that $R$ changes sign in the pseudocritical region, suggesting a change of the nature of interactions at the mesoscopic level from statistically repulsive to attractive. Finally, we find that in the critical region around the critical endpoint $|R|$ scales with the correlation volume, $|R| =K;xi^3$, with $K = O(1)$, as expected from hyperscaling; far from the critical endpoint the correspondence between $|R|$ and the correlation volume is not as good as the one we have found at large $mu$, which is not surprising because at small $mu$ the chiral crossover is quite smooth; nevertheless, we have found that $R$ develops a characteristic peak structure, suggesting that it is still capable to capture the pseudocritical behavior of the condensate.
We study the dressing of four-quark interaction by the ring diagram in an effective chiral quark model. Implementing such an in-medium coupling naturally reduces the chiral transition temperature in a class of chiral models, and is capable of generating the inverse magnetic catalysis at finite temperatures. We also demonstrate the important role of confining forces, via the Polyakov loop, in a positive feedback mechanism which reinforces the inverse magnetic catalysis.
Inspired by recent discussions of inverse magnetic catalysis in the literature, we examine the effects of a uniform external magnetic field on the chiral phase transition in quenched ladder QED at nonzero chemical potential. In particular, we study the behaviour of the effective potential as the strength of the magnetic field is varied while the chemical potential is held constant. For a certain range of the magnetic field, the effective potential develops a local maximum. Inverse magnetic catalysis is observed at this maximum, whereas the usual magnetic catalysis is observed at the true minimum of the effective potential.
We investigate the quark spectrum near but above the critical temperature of the chiral transition, taking into account the precursory soft modes. It is found that there appear novel excitation spectra of quasi-quarks and quasi-antiquarks with a three-peak structure. By a detailed analysis on the formation of the three-peak structure using Yukawa models, it is shown that the new quark spectra originate from the mixing between a quark (anti-quark) and an antiquark hole (quark hole) caused by a resonant scattering of the quasi-quark with the soft modes which have a small but finite excitation energy with a small width near the critical temperature.