Chiral phase structure and critical end point in QCD

Abstract:

We map out the QCD phase structure at finite temperature and chemical potential for 2-flavour and $2 + 1$ 2+1-flavour QCD. This is done within a generalised functional approach to QCD put forward in [1]. Specifically we compute the quark propagator and the finite-temperature and density fluctuations of the gluon propagator and the quark-gluon vertex on the basis of precision data for vacuum correlation functions. The novel ingredient is the direct self-consistent computation of the DSEs for the three dominant dressings of the quark-gluon vertex, in contrast to the common use of STI-inspired vertices.

For small densities the results for the chiral order parameter agree with the respective lattice and functional renormalisation group results, for large densities the present results are in a quantitative agreement with the latter, including the location of the critical end point.

F. Gao, J. M. Pawlowski, “Chiral phase structure and critical end point in QCD”, Physics
Letters B 820, 136584 (2021).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269321005244?via%3Dihub

Related to Project A02