We revisit the determination of the pseudo-critical line of QCD with four degenerate quarks at non-zero temperature and baryon density by the method of analytic continuation. We determine the pseudo-critical couplings at imaginary chemical potentials by high-statistics Monte Carlo simulations and reveal deviations from the simple quadratic dependence on the chemical potential visible in earlier works on the same subject. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the shape of the pseudo-critical line at real chemical potential, comparing different possible extrapolations.
We show how the hopping parameter expansion at order $κ^2$ and $κ^4$ can be exploited in the simulation of lattice QCD with two flavours of degenerate Wilson fermions. A natural extension of this idea is a "UV-filtering" by using rooted polynomials. These approaches can be easily combined with, for example, mass preconditioning. First numerical tests are performed for the Wilson gauge action at $β=5.6$ and $κ=0.156$ and $0.1575$.
In this review we present the current state-of-the-art on complex Langevin simulations and their implications for the QCD phase diagram. After a short summary of the complex Langevin method, we present and discuss recent developments. Here we focus on the explicit computation of boundary terms, which provide an observable that can be used to check one of the criteria of correctness explicitly. We also present the method of Dynamic Stabilization and elaborate on recent results for fully dynamical QCD.
In recent years there has been much progress on the investigation of the QCD phase diagram with lattice QCD. This talk will focus on the developments in the last few years. Especially the addition of external influences and extended ranges of $T$ and $μ$ yield an increasing number of interesting results, a subset of which will be discussed. Many of these conditions are important for the understanding of both the QCD transition in the early universe and heavy ion collision experiments which are conducted for example at the LHC and RHIC. This offers many exciting opportunities for comparisons be…
We discuss the phase diagram of QCD in the presence of a strong background magnetic field, providing numerical evidence, based on lattice simulations of QCD with $2+1$ flavours and physical quark masses, that the QCD crossover turns into a first order phase transition for large enough magnetic field, with a critical endpoint located between $eB=4$ GeV$^2$ (where we found an analytic crossover at a pseudo-critical temperature $T_c=(98\pm3)$ MeV) and $eB=9$ GeV$^2$ (where the measured critical temperature is $T_c=(63\pm5)$ MeV).
The thermodynamics of QCD with sufficiently heavy dynamical quarks can be described by a three-dimensional Polyakov loop effective theory, obtained after a truncated character and hopping expansion. We investigate the resulting phase diagram for low temperatures by mean field methods. Taking into account chemical potentials for both baryon number and isospin, we obtain clear signals for a liquid-gas type transition to baryon matter at $μ_I=0$ and a Bose-Einstein condensation transition at $μ_B=0$, as well as for their connection when both chemical potentials are non-zero.
We use complex Langevin simulations to explore the QCD phase diagram over a large range of chemical potentials and temperatures. For our simulations, we use two flavours of dynamical Wilson fermions with a pion mass of approximately $480\,$MeV with a spatial volume of $24^3$. Here we report on consistency checks at zero chemical potentials and present our results for the fermion density and the Polyakov loop. We find that at the lowest temperature the fermion density remains zero until $m_N/3$, in line with the expectations from the Silver Blaze phenomenon.
QCD, the theory of the strong interactions, involves quarks interacting with non-Abelian gluon fields. This theory has many features that are difficult to impossible to see in conventional diagrammatic perturbation theory. This includes quark confinement, mass generation, and chiral symmetry breaking. This paper is a colloquium level overview of the framework for understanding how these effects come about.
