I show an updated QCD phase diagram with recent developments from chiral effective theories and phenomenological models. Expected signals of a QCD critical point accessible in heavy-ion collisions are also discussed. In particular, non-monotonic behavior of fluctuations associated with conserved charges is focused on.
We give a general overview about the approaches to study the phase diagram of QCD. Thereafter, we examine the evolution of a fireball in a chiral fluid dynamic model including nonequilibrium effects.
N* masses in the spin-1/2 and spin-3/2 sectors are computed using two non-perturbative methods: lattice QCD and QCD sum rules. States with both positive and negative parity are isolated via parity projection methods. The basic pattern of the mass splittings is consistent with experiments. The mass splitting within the same parity pair is directly linked to the chiral symmetry breaking QCD.
Standard QCD sum-rule analyses of the nucleon mass give results that are inconsistent with chiral perturbation theory due to an overly simple continuum ansatz on the phenomenological side of the sum rule. We show that a careful treatment of the continuum, including $π$-$N$ states and other states with virtual pions, resolves the inconsistency associated with chiral logs.
Nonperturbative Wilson coefficients associated with the leading chiral-symmetry-breaking operators in the operator product expansion of the pseudoscalar QCD correlation function are derived. Implementation of the new, instanton-induced operators enables the corresponding spectral sum rule to reproduce the small pion mass scale, thereby reconciling it with Goldstone's theorem. The same operators suppress the contributions of pionic resonances. Several predictions and structural insights from the new sum rule are discussed.
A detailed investigation of the low-energy chiral expansion is presented within a model truncation of QCD. The truncation allows for a phenomenological description of the quark-quark interaction in a framework which maintains the global symmetries of QCD and permits a $1/N_c$ expansion. The model dependence of the chiral coefficients is tested for several forms of the quark-quark interaction by varying the form of the running coupling, $α(q^2)$, in the infrared region. The pattern in the coefficients that arises at tree level is consistent with large $N_c$ QCD, and is related to the model trun…
We derive the chiral effective Lagrangian for heavy-light mesons in the heavy quark limit from QCD under proper approximations. The low energy constants in the effective Lagrangian are expressed in terms of the light quark self-energy. With typical forms of the running coupling constant of QCD and the quark self-energy obtained from Dyson-Schwinger equations as well as lattice QCD, we estimate the low energy constants in the model and the strong decay widths. A comparison with data and some discussions of the numerical results are presented.
The QCD vacuum condensates and various vacuum susceptibilities are all important parameters which characterize the nonperturbative properties of the QCD vacuum. In the QCD sum rules external field formula, various QCD vacuum susceptibilities play important roles in determining the properties of hadrons. In this paper, we review the recent progress in studies of vacuum susceptibilities together with their applications to the chiral phase transition of QCD. The results of the tensor, the vector, the axial-vector, the scalar, and the pseudo-scalar vacuum susceptibilities are shown in detail in th…
We investigate the influence of the isospin asymmetry on the phase structure of quark matter near the chiral critical point systematically using a generalized version of Ginzburg-Landau approach. The effect has proven to be so profound that it brings about not only a shift of the critical point but also a rich variety of phases in its neighborhood. In particular, there shows up a phase with spatially varying charged pion condensate which we name the "solitonic pion condensate" in addition to the "chiral defect lattice" where the chiral condensate is partially destructed by periodic placements …
We show that the quark (not nucleon) based chiral linear $σ$ model which receives strong support as a mean field theory for the strong interactions can actually be made asymptotically free by coupling to gluons. It has the further bonus of providing confinement.Alternatively, this theory is QCD that is chirally extended by the addition of a $(σ,π)$ chiral multiplet. It could therefore be a candidate theory for the strong interactions which is somewhat different from QCD.
Several recent papers -using effective QCD chiral Lagrangians- reproduced results obtained with the general QCD parameterization (GP). These include the baryon 8+10 mass formula, the octet magnetic moments and the coincidental nature of the "perfect" -3/2 ratio between the magnetic moments of p and n. Although we anticipated that the GP covers the case of chiral treatments, the above results explicitly exemplify this fact. Also we show by the GP that -in any model or theory (chiral or non chiral) reproducing the results of exact QCD- the Franklin (Coleman Glashow) sum rule for the octet magnet…
As an extension of $QCD$, consider a theory with ``$2+1$'' flavors, where the current quark masses are held in a fixed ratio as the overall scale of the quark masses is varied. At nonzero temperature and baryon density it is expected that in the chiral limit the chiral phase transition is of first order. Increasing the quark mass from zero, the chiral transition becomes more weakly first order, and can end in a chiral critical point. We show that the only massless field at the chiral critical point is a sigma meson, with the universality class that of the Ising model. Present day lattice simul…
We study the polarized structure functions in QCD. We show that $g_T$ which probes helicity flip interactions in hadrons on the light-front indeed measures the QCD dynamics of chiral symmetry breaking. The relation between chiral symmetry breaking and the observed $g_2$ data is explored.
We analyze the chiral phase transition with the help of the QCD gap equation. Various models for the effective interaction in rainbow truncation are contrasted with regard to the resulting chiral transition temperatures. In particular, we investigate possible systematic relations of the details of the effective interaction and the value of T_c. In addition, we quantify changes to the transition temperature beyond the rainbow truncation.
Chiral symmetry is an essential concept in understanding QCD at low energy. We treat the chiral condensate, which measures the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry, as a free parameter to investigate the effect of partially restored chiral symmetry on the physical quantities in the frame work of an AdS/QCD model. We observe an interesting scaling behavior among the nucleon mass, pion decay constant and chiral condensate. We propose a phenomenological way to introduce the temperature dependence of a physical quantity in the AdS/QCD model with the thermal AdS metric.
These are the proceedings of the workshop on ``Lattice QCD, Chiral Perturbation Theory and Hadron Phenomenology'' held at the European Centre for Theoretical Studies in Nuclear Physics and Related Areas from October 2 to 6, 2006. The workshop concentrated on bringing together researchers working in lattice QCD and chiral perturbation theory with the aim of improving our understanding how hadron properties can be calculated and analyzed from first principles. Included are a short contribution per talk.
Exploiting the recent lattice results for the infrared gluon propagator with light dynamical quarks, we solve the gap equation for the quark propagator. We thus model the chiral symmetry breaking mechanism with increasing number of flavours and study confinement (intimately tied with the analytic properties of QCD Schwinger functions) order parameters. We obtain, with this approach, clear signals of chiral symmetry restoration and deconfinement when the number of light quark flavors exceeds a critical value of $N_f^c \approx 8 \pm 1$, in agreement with the state-of-the-art direct lattice analy…
I review aspects of chiral dynamics pertinent to the structure of baryons and few-nucleon systems, such as chiral extrapolations for the nucleon and the delta mass, double pion photoproduction off protons, single neutral pion electroproduction off the deuteron, pion photoproduction in the delta region, the quark mass dependence of the nuclear forces and the possibility of an infrared limit cycle in QCD.
The definition of chiral transformations in light-front field theory is very different from the conventional form in equal-time formalism. We study the consistency of chiral transformations and chiral symmetry in light-front QCD and derive a complete new light-front axial-vector current for QCD. The breaking of chiral symmetry in light-front QCD is only associated with helicity flip interaction between quarks and gluons. Remarkably, the new axial-vector current does not contain the pion pole part so that the associate chiral charge smoothly describes pion transitions for various hadronic proce…
In this paper we describe qualitatively some aspects of the holographic QCD. Inspired by a successfull 4D description, we try to separate the Confinement and the Chiral Symmetry Breaking dynamics. We also discuss the realization of the baryons as skyrmions in Soft Wall Holographic QCD, and the issue of the Vector Meson Dominance.
Hyperon-nucleon interactions serve as basic inputs to studies of hypernuclear physics and dense (neutron) stars. Unfortunately, a precise understanding of these important quantities have lagged far behind that of the nucleon-nucleon interaction due to lack of high precision experimental data. Historically, hyperon-nucleon interactions are either formulated in quark models or meson exchange models. In recent years, lattice QCD simulations and chiral effective field theory approaches start to offer new insights from first principles. In the present work, we contrast the state of art lattice QCD …
In the framework of Coulomb Gauge QCD we explore dynamical breaking of chiral symmetry and screening of the confinement potential at finite density. The screened potential is applied in study of charmonium dissociation.
The T-odd quark distrbutions are shown to vanish in the chiral sigma model in contrast to the opposite widespread opinion. This failure of the chiral sigma model is a feature of the model itself and has nothing to do with the recent progress in the clarification of the status of the T-odd distributions in QCD.
We discuss a minimal holographic model for the description of heavy-light and light mesons with chiral symmetry, defined in a slab of AdS space. The model consists of a pair of chiral Yang-Mills and tachyon fields with specific boundary conditions that break spontaneously chiral symmetry in the infrared. The heavy-light spectrum and decay constants are evaluated explicitly. In the heavy mass limit the model exhibits both heavy-quark and chiral symmetry and allows for the explicit derivation of the one-pion axial couplings to the heavy-light mesons.
We present a lattice QCD based determination of the chiral phase transition temperature in QCD with two massless (up and down) and one strange quark having its physical mass. We propose and calculate two novel estimators for the chiral transition temperature for several values of the light quark masses, corresponding to Goldstone pion masses in the range of $58~{\rm MeV}\lesssim m_π\lesssim 163~{\rm MeV}$. The chiral phase transition temperature is determined by extrapolating to vanishing pion mass using universal scaling analysis. After thermodynamic, continuum and chiral extrapolations we fi…
We study confinement and chiral symmetry breaking phase transitions for QCD and supersymmetric QCD. The method is based on some justified assumption regarding the behavior of the Green function relevant for the potential between two charges or a gap equation. We determine the number of flavors at which the transitions to confinement and chiral symmetry breaking take place. We find that whereas for chiral symmetry breaking the results are in perfect agreement with those in the literature for confinement the situation is more complex.
I explain the concept that light quarks diffuse in the QCD vacuum following the spontaneous breakdown of chiral symmetry. I exploit the striking analogy to disordered electrons in metals, identifying, among others, the universal regime described by random matrix theory, diffusive regime described by chiral perturbation theory and the crossover between these two domains.
The chiral magnetic effect (CME) is an exact statement that connects via the axial anomaly the electric current in a system consisting of interacting fermions and gauge field with chirality imbalance that is put into a strong external magnetic field. Experimental search of the magnetically induced current in QCD in heavy ion collisions above a pseudocritical temperature hints, though not yet conclusive, that the induced current is either small or vanishing. This would imply that the chirality imbalance in QCD above $T_c$ that could be generated via topological fluctuations is at most very smal…
I report on recent work done in collaboration with M. Knecht on patterns of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in the large-Nc limit of QCD-like theories, and with S. Peris and M. Perrottet concerning the question of matching long and short distances in large-Nc QCD.
We present the renormalized Taylor expansion of the chiral condensate with chemical potential. The relation with the Taylor coefficients of meson susceptibilities and the quark mass dependence of the quark number susceptibilities are obtained through chiral Ward identities and Maxwell relations. The continuum limit is obtained in quenched and two flavour QCD. In Nf=2 QCD, the quadratic response coefficients (QRCs) of the chiral condensate to chemical potential indicate that pion fluctuations decrease at finite chemical potential toward the critical end point. We discuss how these observables c…
We investigate the interplay between chiral symmetry restoration and deconfinement both in two color QCD and adjoint QCD. In ordinary QCD we show how the behavior of the Polyakov loop near chiral phase transition is induced by the chiral order parameter, while in adjoint two color QCD one has two truly independent phase transitions. Introducing a finite baryochemical potential we find that adjoint QCD exhibits tetracritical behavior.
By matching the world of hadrons to that of some effective chiral quark theory, we determine the induced condensates for QCD sum rules in the presence of an external pion field. The observed values of the strong and weak $πNN$ coupling constants are understood.
We analyze the chiral symmetry breaking of QCD in the Coulomb gauge. Using flow equations, we derive the renormalized gap equation and the Bethe-Salpeter equation and show that they are finite in both UV and IR regions. No additional UV renormalization is required in the chiral limit. We take into account the hyperfine interaction as well as chiral symmetry breaking and obtain the $π-ρ$ mass splitting caused by the instantaneous and dynamical interactions.
Chiral Lagrangian mesonic fields can be connected to QCD quark operators via matrix operators containing scale factors. These scale factor matrices are shown to be constrained by chiral symmetry, resulting in a universal scale factor for each Chiral Lagrangian nonet. QCD sum-rules, combined with mixing angles from Chiral Lagrangian analyses, are used to determine the scale factors for the $a_0$ isotriplet and $K_0^*$ isodoublet scalar mesons. The resulting scale factors verify the universality property, providing a validation of the scale factor matrices connecting Chiral Lagrangian mesonic fi…
We study the chemical potential effects on the chiral phase transition in a simply improved soft-wall AdS/QCD model, which can realize consistently the properties of linear confinement and spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking. The $μ-T$ phase diagrams with both zero and physical quark masses have been obtained from this model. For the case of physical quark mass, the chiral transition has a crossover behavior at low chemical potential. With the increase of the chemical potential $μ$, the critical temperature $T_c$ descends towards zero, and the crossover transition turns into a first-order one…
QCD sum rules are useful tools for studying the spectral properties of hadrons; however, assumptions underlying standard sum-rule analyses can lead to inconsistencies with known results of chiral perturbation theory. This possibility is demonstrated with QCD sum-rule extractions of the nucleon mass and $σ$ term. In both cases, inconsistent chiral behavior leads to an uncertainty in the sum-rule predictions of $\sim 100\,\text{MeV}$.
Chiral symmetry restoration high in the hadron spectra is expected but it remains to be confirmed both in lattice QCD computations and in experiments. Recently, a theorem was derived, relating chiral symmetry restoration high in the hadron spectra to the spontaneous generation of the dynamical quark mass in QCD. We refine the theorem in the case of static-light mesons. Utilizing chiral quark model computations and lattice QCD results for the spectrum of mesons composed by a static antiquark and a light quark, we explore chiral symmetry restoration in the spectrum and the quark running mass m(k…
I review the consequences of the chiral symmetry of QCD for the structure and dynamics of the low-lying baryons, with particular emphasis on the nucleon.
The mass spectrum of Delta resonances is compared to predictions based on three quark-model variants, to predictions assuming that chiral symmetry is restored in high-mass baryon resonances, and to predictions derived from AdS/QCD. The latter approach yields a nearly perfect agreement when the confinement property of QCD is modeled by a soft wall in AdS.
The QCD sum rule approach is employed in order to study chiral properties of positive- and negative-parity nucleon resonances. It is pointed out that nucleons with an ``exotic'' chiral property, which can be represented by local five-quark operators, can be paired with a standard nucleon forming a single chiral multiplet. The sum rules of the five-quark operators, however, are shown not to couple strongly to chirally-``exotic'' nucleon resonances at the mass region of less than 2 GeV.
We incorporate chiral symmetry breaking in a soft-wall version of the AdS/QCD model by using a modified dilaton profile and a quartic term in the bulk scalar potential. This allows one to separate the dependence on spontaneous and explicit chiral symmetry breaking. The resulting mass spectra in the scalar, vector and axial-vector sectors compares favorably with the respective QCD resonances.
We develop a color bosonization approach to treatment of QCD gauge field (''gluons'') at low energies in order to derive an effective color action of QCD taking into account the quark chiral anomaly in the case of SU(2) color.. We have found that there exists such a region in the chiral sector of color space, where a gauge field coincides with of chirally rotated vector field, while an induced axial vector field disappears. In this region, the unit color vector of chiral field plays a defining role, and a gauge field is parametrized in terms of chiral parameters, so that no additional degrees …
We study physics at temperatures just above the QCD phase transition (Tc) using chiral (overlap) Fermions in the quenched approximation of lattice QCD. Exact zero modes of the overlap Dirac operator are localized and their frequency of occurrence drops with temperature. This is closely related to axial U(1) symmetry, which remains broken up to 2Tc. After subtracting the effects of these zero modes, chiral symmetry is restored, as indicated by the behavior of the chiral condensate. The pseudoscalar and vector screening masses are close to ideal gas values.
The $U(1)_A$ boson mass is calculated through the phenomenological characteristics of the vacuum related to spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry in QCD. The mass is determined by the mixed quark-gluon condensate $\langle \bar q G q \rangle$ that emerges in an appropriate correlation function due to triangle anomaly. For three flavor QCD in chiral limit we find the numerical value for the $U(1)_A$ boson mass to be $M_0=310\pm 50~{\rm MeV}$.
We determine the critical coupling constant above which dynamical chiral symmetry breaking occurs in a class of QCD motivated models where the gluon propagator has an enhanced infrared behavior. Using methods of bifurcation theory we find that the critical value of the coupling constant is always smaller than the one obtained for QCD.
In a previous work, we analyzed collapsing axion stars using the low-energy instanton potential, showing that the total energy is always bounded and that collapsing axion stars do not form black holes. In this paper, we provide a proof that the conclusions are unchanged when using instead the more general chiral potential for QCD axions.
Basic chiral QCD parameters (the pion decay constant, the quark and gluon condensates, the dynamically generated quark mass, etc) as well as the vacuum energy density (up to the sign, by definition, the bag constant) have been calculated from first principles within a recently proposed zero modes enhancement (ZME) model of the true QCD vacuum. Our unique input data was chosen to be the pion decay constant in the chiral limit as given by the chiral perturbation theory at the hadronic level (CHPTh). In order to analyze our numerical results we set a scale by two different ways. In both cases we …
Properties of the scale-factor matrices forming a bridge between the mesonic fields of chiral Lagrangians and quark-level structures of QCD sum-rules are reviewed. The scale-factor matrices combined with mixing angles provide a physical projection of a QCD correlation function matrix that disentangles the mesonic states. This methodology is illustrated for the isotriplet $a_0(980)$-$a_0(1450)$ system, and the scale factors are determined from the combined inputs of QCD sum-rules and chiral Lagrangians. The resulting scale factors are shown to be in good agreement with the vacuum expectation va…
The main aspects of chiral symmetry in QCD are presented. The necessity of its spontaneous breakdown is explained. Some low-energy theorems are reviewed. The role of chiral effective Lagrangians in the formulation and realization of chiral perturbation theory is emphasized. The consequences of the presence of anomalies are sketched.
Using the lattice gauge field theory, we study the relation among the local chiral condensate, monopoles, and color magnetic fields in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). First, we investigate idealized Abelian gauge systems of 1) a static monopole-antimonopole pair and 2) a magnetic flux without monopoles, on a four-dimensional Euclidean lattice. In these systems, we calculate the local chiral condensate on quasi-massless fermions coupled to the Abelian gauge field, and find that the chiral condensate is localized in the vicinity of the magnetic field. Second, using SU(3) lattice QCD Monte Carlo ca…
The critical endpoint of the QCD phase diagram is usually expected to belong to the chiral critical surface, i.e. the surface of second order transitions bounding the region of first order chiral phase transitions for small quark masses in the {m_{u,d}, m_s,μ} parameter space. For μ=0, QCD with physical quark masses is known to be an analytic crossover, requiring the region of chiral transitions to expand with μfor a critical endpoint to exist. Instead, on coarse N_t=4 lattices, we find the area of chiral transitions to shrink with μ, which excludes a chiral critical point for QCD at moderate …
A detailed investigation of the low-energy chiral expansion is presented within a model truncation of QCD. The model dependence of the chiral coefficients is tested for several forms of the quark-quark interaction by varying the form of the running coupling in the infrared region. Furthermore we demonstrate how the UA(1)$ anomaly and a mass for the eta' can arise in this approach.
We construct an improved soft-wall AdS/QCD model with a cubic coupling term of the dilaton and the bulk scalar field. The background fields in this model are solved from the Einstein-dilaton system with a nontrivial dilaton potential, which has been shown to be able to reproduce the equation of state from lattice QCD with two flavors. The chiral transition behaviors are investigated in the improved soft-wall AdS/QCD model with the solved gravitational background, and the crossover transition can be realized. Our study provides a possibility to address the deconfining and chiral phase transitio…
Using the Gell-Mann-Oakes-Renner (GOR) relation and semi-classical arguments, we show that the bulk quark spectrum in QCD exhibits a variety of regimes including the ergodic one described by random matrix theory. We analyze the quark spectral form-factor in the diffusive and ballistic regime. We suggest that a class of chiral transitions in QCD is possibly of the metal-insulator type, with a universal spectral statistics at the mobility edge.
The chiral critical surface is a surface of second order phase transitions bounding the region of first order chiral phase transitions for small quark masses in the {m_{u,d}, m_s,μ} parameter space. The potential critical endpoint of the QCD (T,μ)-phase diagram is widely expected to be part of this surface. Since for μ=0 with physical quark masses QCD is known to exhibit an analytic crossover, this expectation requires the region of chiral transitions to expand with μfor a chiral critical endpoint to exist. Instead, on coarse N_t=4 lattices, we find the area of chiral transitions to shrink wit…
We perform a first lattice QCD simulation including two-flavor dynamical fermion with a chiral chemical potential. Because the chiral chemical potential gives rise to no sign problem, we can exactly analyze a chirally imbalanced QCD matter by the Monte Carlo simulation. By applying an external magnetic field to this system, we obtain a finite induced current along the magnetic field, which corresponds to the chiral magnetic effect. The obtained induced current is proportional to the magnetic field and to the chiral chemical potential, which is consistent with an analytical prediction.
This paper consists of an overview of the discussions on chiral symmetry breaking followed by a transcript of the discussions themselves. (Based on discussions at ``Theory of Hadrons and Light-Front QCD,'' Polana Zgorzelisko, Poland, August 1994.)