In this talk we discuss the microscopic limit of QCD at nonzero chemical potential. In this domain, where the QCD partition function is under complete analytical control, we uncover an entirely new link between the spectral density of the Dirac opera
tor and the chiral condensate: violent complex oscillations on the microscopic scale give rise to the discontinuity of the chiral condensate at zero quark mass. We first establish this relation exactly within a random matrix framework and then analyze the importance of the individual modes by Fourier analysis.
The chiral condensate in QCD at zero temperature does not depend on the quark chemical potential (up to one third the nucleon mass), whereas the spectral density of the Dirac operator shows a strong dependence on the chemical potential. The cancellat
ions which make this possible also occur on the microscopic scale, where they can be investigated by means of a random matrix model. We show that they can be understood in terms of orthogonality properties of orthogonal polynomials. In the strong non-Hermiticity limit they are related to integrability properties of the spectral density. As a by-product we find exact analytical expressions for the partially quenched chiral condensate in the microscopic domain at nonzero chemical potential.
The Dirac spectrum of QCD with dynamical fermions at nonzero chemical potential is characterized by three regions, a region with a constant eigenvalue density, a region where the eigenvalue density shows oscillations that grow exponentially with the
volume and the remainder of the complex plane where the eigenvalue density is zero. In this paper we derive the phase diagram of the Dirac spectrum from a chiral Lagrangian. We show that the constant eigenvalue density corresponds to a pion condensed phase while the strongly oscillating region is given by a kaon condensed phase. The normal phase with nonzero chiral condensate but vanishing Bose condensates coincides with the region of the complex plane where there are no eigenvalues.
