No Arabic abstract
Neither the chiral limit nor finite baryon density can be simulated directly in lattice QCD, which severely limits our understanding of the QCD phase diagram. In this review I collect results for the phase structure in an extended parameter space of QCD, with varying numbers of flavours, quark masses, colours, lattice spacings, imaginary and isospin chemical potentials. Such studies help in understanding the underlying symmetries and degrees of freedom, and are beginning to provide a consistent picture constraining the possibilities for the physical phase diagram.
We determine the phase diagram of QCD on the mu-T plane for small to moderate chemical potentials. Two transition lines are defined with two quantities, the chiral condensate and the strange quark number susceptibility. The calculations are carried out on N_t =6,8 and 10 lattices generated with a Symanzik improved gauge and stout-link improved 2+1 flavor staggered fermion action using physical quark masses. After carrying out the continuum extrapolation we find that both quantities result in a similar curvature of the transition line. Furthermore, our results indicate that in leading order the width of the transition region remains essentially the same as the chemical potential is increased.
We study the phase structure of lattice QCD with heavy quarks at finite temperature and density by a histogram method. We determine the location of the critical point at which the first-order deconfining transition in the heavy-quark limit turns into a crossover at intermediate quark masses through a change of the shape of the histogram under variation of coupling parameters. We estimate the effect of the complex phase factor which causes the sign problem at finite density, and show that, in heavy-quark QCD, the effect is small around the critical point. We determine the critical surface in 2+1 flavor QCD in the heavy-quark region at all values of the chemical potential mu including mu=infty.
QCD matter at finite temperature and density is a subject that has witnessed very impressive theoretical developments in the recent years. In this review I will discuss some new insights on the microscopic degrees of freedom of the QCD medium near the chiral crossover transition from lattice QCD. Latest high precision lattice data on the fluctuations and correlations between conserved charges like the baryon number, strangeness can help us to understand and distinguish between different models of interacting hadrons. Furthermore, the latest constraints on the location of the critical end-point and the curvature of the critical line will be discussed. In the later part of this review I will discuss about the insights on the thermal nature of the medium created in heavy ion collision experiments that have come from the theoretical analysis of the particle yields, and to what extent the lattice data on correlations and fluctuations of conserved charges can give us any information about the fireball at freezeout.
Monte Carlo studies of QCD at finite density suffer from the sign problem, which becomes easily uncontrollable as the chemical potential $mu$ is increased even for a moderate lattice size. In this work we make an attempt to approach the high density low temperature region by the complex Langevin method (CLM) using four-flavor staggered fermions with reasonably small quark mass on a $8^3 times 16$ lattice. Unlike the previous work on a $4^3 times 8$ lattice, the criterion for correct convergence is satisfied within a wide range of $mu$ without using the deformation technique. In particular, the baryon number density exhibits a plateau behavior consistent with the formation of eight baryons, and it starts to grow gradually at some $mu$.
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.