QCD thermal phase transition in the presence of a small chemical potential

By C. Allton, S. Ejiri, S. Hands, O. Kaczmarek, F. Karsch, E. Laermann, C. Schmidt, L. Scorzato. 2002

425 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose a new method to investigate the thermal properties of QCD with a small quark chemical potential mu. Derivatives of quark and gluonic observables with respect to mu are computed at mu=0 for two flavors of p4 improved staggered fermions with ma=0.1,0.2 on a 16(3)x4 lattice, and used to calculate the leading order Taylor expansion in mu of the location of the pseudocritical point about mu=0. This expansion should be well behaved for the small values of mu(q)/T(c)similar to0.1 relevant for BNL RHIC phenomenology, and predicts a critical curve T-c(mu) in reasonable agreement with estimates obtained using exact reweighting. In addition, we contrast the case of isoscalar and isovector chemical potentials, quantify the effect of munot equal0 on the equation of state, and comment on the complex phase of the fermion determinant in QCD with munot equal0.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a54ed1c0c2755972e651e39d6190a98ae1633801

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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Citations in the corpus

• Strongly correlated quantum fluids: ultracold quantum gases, quantum chromodynamic plasmas and holographic duality (2012, background): “A number of exploratory calculations have been performed [207, 208, 209, 210], but at this point it is not even clear whether the idea that the transition strengthens as the baryon chemical potential increases is correct [211].”
• Chiral crossover in QCD at zero and non-zero chemical potentials (2018, methodology): “, of Σ, can be obtained by following the well-established Taylor expansion method [7–9] given by”
• The phase diagram of dense QCD (2010, background): “If μq is small enough, the right-hand side of (22) can be expanded in terms of μq/T [114, 115, 116],”
• Heavy ions and string theory (2013, background): “theory techniques is constrained by the sign problem, which makes computations at nonzero very difcult. Lattice methods to avoid the sign problem, such as Taylor expansions around = 0, are possible [179,180,181], but nonetheless it is natural to pursue other theoretical techniques not aected by the ”
• Polyakov loop modeling for hot QCD (2017, background): “k costs less energy than a test quark. In other words, we can place an anti-quark more easily than a quark into the nite-density medium, which should be naturally so due to screening eects; see Ref. [147] for lattice-QCD results and physical discussions. Now, one might think that, once the mean-eld ”