We study the fixed-point structure of four-fermion interactions in two-flavor QCD with Nc colors close to the finite-temperature phase boundary. In particular, we analyze how the fixed-point structure of four-fermion interactions is related to the confining dynamics in the gauge sector. We show that there exists indeed a mechanism which dynamically locks the chiral phase transition to the deconfinement phase transition. This mechanism allows us to determine a window for the values of physical observables in which the two phase transitions lie close to each other.
By introducing the dressed Polayakov loop or dual chiral condensate as a candidate order parameter to describe the deconfinement phase transition for light flavors, we discuss the interplay between the chiral and deconfinement phase transitions, and propose the possible QCD phase diagram at finite temperature and density. We also introduce a dynamical gluodynamic model with dimension-2 gluon condensate, which can describe the color electric deconfinement as well as color magnetic confinement.
We calculated the chiral condensate and the dressed Polyakov loop in the space-time $R\times S^{3}$ and $R\times H^{3}$. The chiral condensate is the order parameter for the chiral phase transition, and the dressed Polyakov loop is the order parameter for the deconfinement phase transition. When there is a current mass, critical points for the chiral and deconfinement phase transitions are different in the crossover region. We show that the difference is changed by the gravitational effect.
We show that in a hot hadron gas, chiral symmetry restoration and deconfinement lead to a strong suppression of dilepton production by pion annihilation in the continuum above the $ρ-ω-ϕ$ peak. The suppression due to deconfinement persists also for annihilation reactions involving heavier mesons.
We discuss the relation between color deconfinement characterized by the Polyakov loop and chiral restoration characterized by the chiral condensate. We clarify how and why these two phenomena should take place at the same pseudo-critical temperature.
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.
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.
We discuss the relation between the Polyakov loop and the chiral order parameter at finite temperature by using an effective model. We clarify why and how the pseudo-critical temperature associated with the Polyakov loop should coincide with that of the chiral condensate.
We study the features of nonlocal SU(3) chiral quark models with wave function renormalization. Model parameters are determined from meson phenomenology, considering different nonlocal form factor shapes. In this context we analyze the characteristics of the deconfinement and chiral restoration transitions at finite temperature, introducing the couplings of fermions to the Polyakov loop. We analyze the results obtained for various thermodynamical quantities considering different Polyakov loop potentials and nonlocal form factors, in comparison with data obtained from lattice QCD calculations.
We use the Polyakov loop coupled quark-meson model to approximate low energy QCD and present results for the chiral and deconfinement transitions in the presence of a constant magnetic background $B$ at finite temperature $T$ and baryon chemical potential $μ_B$. We investigate effects of various gluoni potentials on the deconfinement transition with and without a fermionic backreaction at finite $B$. Additionally we investigate the effect of the Polyakov loop on the chiral phase transition, finding that magnetic catalysis at low $μ_B$ is present, but weakened by the Polyakov loop.
Lattice QCD simulations at finite temperature have shown that the chiral phase transition in the chiral limit and the deconfinement phase transition in the quenched limit are continuously connected. I emphasize the nontriviality of this result and propose an unconventional scenario which naturally explains the existing lattice data. The continuity of the two phase transitions is a manifestation of the familiar glueball-meson mixing, which can be traced back to the properties of QCD at zero temperature.
Based on the experimental observation that there is a coexisting region between the antiferromagnetic (AF) and $\textit{d}$-wave superconducting ($\textit{d}$SC) phases, the influences of gauge boson mass $m_{a}$ on chiral symmetry restoration and deconfinement phase transitions in QED$_{3}$ are investigated simultaneously within a unified framework, i.e., Dyson-Schwinger equations. The results show that the chiral symmetry restoration phase transition in the presence of the gauge boson mass $m_{a}$ is a typical second-order phase transition; the chiral symmetry restoration and deconfinement p…
Based on the truncated Dyson-Schwinger equations for fermion and massive boson propagators in QED$_3$, the fermion chiral condensate and the mass singularities of the fermion propagator via the Schwinger function are investigated. It is shown that the critical point of chiral phase transition is apparently different from that of deconfinement phase transition and in Nambu phase the fermion is confined only for small gauge boson mass.
The phase transitions characterized by deconfinement and restoration of chiral symmetry as well as the restoration of axial symmetry, at finite temperature, are investigated in the framework of SU(2) Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (PNJL) models with the U$_A$(1) anomaly. The thermodynamics of the phase transitions, the topological susceptibility, the meson spectrum, and, in particular, the convergence of axial and chiral partners are analyzed, in the framework of the ordinary PNJL model and in its extension, the entangled Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (EPNJL) model. The latter incorporates entangle…
The Doctoral thesis of William Naylor. Gives the background of the three papers included, specifically introducing both the quark meson model and the NJL model, the basic formalism of thermal field theory, and functional renormalization group (including some details on numerically solving the FRG equation for the QM model).
We study the deconfinement and chiral restoration transitions in the context of non-local PNJL models, considering the impact of the presence of dynamical quarks on the scale parameter appearing in the Polyakov potential. We show that the corresponding critical temperatures are naturally entangled for both zero and imaginary chemical potential, in good agreement with lattice QCD results. We also analyze the Roberge Weiss transition, which is found to be first order at the associated endpoint.
The entanglement extended Polyakov--Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model at zero chemical potential in the presence of an external magnetic field is studied. The effect of the entanglement parametrization is analyzed, in particular, on the pseudocritical transition temperatures and on the thermodynamical properties of the model. The model predicts that the coincidence or not of both chiral and deconfinement transition temperatures, in the presence of an external magnetic field, depends on the entanglement parametrization chosen.
In the framework of nonlocal SU(2) chiral quark models with Polyakov loop, we analyze the dependence of the deconfinement and chiral restoration critical temperatures on the explicit chiral symmetry breaking driven by the current quark mass. Our results are compared with those obtained within the standard local Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (PNJL) model and with lattice QCD calculations. For a wide range of pion masses, it is found that both deconfinement and chiral restoration critical temperatures turn out to be strongly entangled, in contrast with the corresponding results within the PNJL mod…
In this talk we present results on the chiral and the deconfinement transition of quenched QCD from Dyson-Schwinger equations. We determine the ordinary quark condensate signaling the chiral transition and the dual quark condensate signaling the deconfinement transition from the Landau gauge quark propagator evaluated at generalized boundary conditions. We find only slightly different transition temperatures at finite quark masses, whereas the transition temperatures coincide in the chiral limit.
The symmetry breaking pattern of QCD features two seemingly disconnected phenomena: the spontaneous breakdown of the Z(3) center symmetry in the deconfinement transition of pure-gauge QCD, and the spontaneous breaking of chiral SU(N_f)xSU(N_f) symmetry in the limit of N_f massless quark flavours. The dynamical entanglement of these symmetries is displayed in the framework of a schematic model (the PNJL model) in comparison with results from Lattice QCD. Extensions to non-zero baryon chemical potential are discussed.
We discuss chiral and deconfinement aspects of the finite temperature transition in QCD using improved staggered actions. We study different quantities related to chiral and deconfinement transition and discuss their cutoff dependence. Contrary to some earlier lattice results we find that the chiral and deconfinement transition are not closely interconnected.
We investigate the chiral and the deconfinement transition within the framework of Dyson-Schwinger equations using quenched lattice data for the temperature dependent gluon propagator as input. We extract corresponding order parameters from the Landau gauge quark propagator with U(1)-valued boundary conditions. We study the chiral transition using the conventional quark condensate, whereas for the deconfinement transition we determine the dual condensate ('dressed Polyakov loop'). In addition we consider an alternative order parameter for deconfinement, the dual scalar quark dressing function.…
QCD sum rules are based on the Operator Product Expansion of current correlators, and on QCD-hadron duality. An extension of this program to finite temperature is discussed. This allows for a study of deconfinement and chiral-symmetry restoration. In addition, it is possible to relate certain hadronic matrix elements to expectation values of quark and gluon field operators by using thermal Finite Energy Sum Rules. In this way one can determine the temperature behaviour of hadron masses and couplings, as well as form factors. An attempt is made to clarify some misconceptions in the existing lit…
We propose that in QCD with dynamical quarks, colour deconfinement occurs when an external field induced by the chiral condensate strongly aligns the Polyakov loop. This effect sets in at the chiral symmetry restoration temperature T-chi and thus makes deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration coincide. The predicted singular behaviour of Polyakov loop susceptibilities at T-chi is shown to be supported by finite temperature lattice calculations.
I review recent results obtained within chiral effective models, on the phase structure of hot quark matter in a strong magnetic background. After a brief introduction, I focus on the results obtained within two chiral models improved with the Polyakov loop. The models differ for the content of interactions, but both of them are tuned to reproduce Lattice QCD thermodynamics at zero and imaginary chemical potential. One of them takes into account an explicit Polyakov loop dependence of the coupling; the other one neglects this contribution, but takes into account multi-quark interactions. A com…
We show that the electric glueball becomes critical at the end-point of the deconfinement phase transition in finite temperature QCD. Based on this observation and existing lattice data, we argue that the chiral phase transition at a zero quark mass and the deconfinement phase transition at an infinite quark mass are continuously connected by the glueball-sigma mixing.
The Polyakov loop extended Nambu and Jona-Lasinio model (PNJL model) in a mean field framework shows astonishingly good agreement with lattice QCD calculations which needs to be better understood. The present work reports on further developments concerning both Polyakov loop and mesonic fluctuations beyond mean field approximation. Corrections beyond mean field are of special interest for the thermal expectation values of the Polyakov loop $Φ$ and its conjugate $Φ^*$, which differ once the quark chemical potential is non-zero. Mesonic fluctuations are also considered with emphasis on the role …
The light-quark correlator in the axial-vector channel is used, in conjunction with finite energy QCD sum rules at finite temperature, in order to (a) establish a relation between chiral-symmetry restoration and deconfinement, and (b) determine the temperature behavior of the $a_1(1260)$ width and coupling. Results indicate that deconfinement takes place at a slightly lower temperature than chiral-symmetry restoration, although this difference is not significant given the accuracy of the method. The behaviour of the $a_1(1260)$ parameters is consistent with quark-gluon deconfinement, as the wi…
We study the relation between the continuum threshold as function of the temperature $s_0(T)$ within finite energy sum rules and the trace of the Polyakov loop $Φ$ in the framework of a nonlocal SU(2) chiral quark model, establishing a contact between both deconfinement order parameters at finite temperature $T$ and chemical potential $μ$. In our analysis, we also include the order parameter for the chiral symmetry restoration, the chiral quark condensate. We found that $s_0$ and $Φ$ providing us the same information for the deconfinement transition, both for the zero and finite chemical poten…
We study interplay between confinement/deconfinement and chiral properties. We derive some analytical relations of the Dirac modes with the confinement quantities, such as the Polyakov loop, its susceptibility and the string tension. For the confinement quantities, the low-lying Dirac eigenmodes are found to give negligible contribution, while they are essential for chiral symmetry breaking. This indicates no direct, one-to-one correspondence between confinement/deconfinement and chiral properties in QCD. We also investigate the Polyakov loop in terms of the eigenmodes of the Wilson, the clove…
We study the gluonic sector of the three-flavor PNJL model by obtaining the adjoint Polyakov loop and the gluon distribution function in the mean-field approximation. Besides, we explore the thermal strange quark pair-production processes, $q\bar {q} \to s\bar {s}$ and $gg \to s \bar {s}$, with the aid of the three-flavor PNJL model. The results help us identify the temperature where the gluonic contribution to the production rate becomes dominant, which is an innovative phenomenon compared with the result obtained in free perturbation theory.
We consider the light-quark axial-vector current correlator in the framework of thermal QCD sum rules to: (a) find a relation between chiral-symmetry restoration and deconfinement, and (b) determine the temperature behaviour of the $a_1(1260)$ width and coupling. Our results show that deconfinement takes place at a slightly lower temperature than chiral-symmetry restoration.This difference is not significant given the accuracy of the method. The behaviour of the $a_1(1260)$ parameters is consistent with quark-gluon deconfinement, since the width grows and the coupling decreases with increasing…
We propose that in QCD with dynamical quarks, colour deconfinement occurs when an external field induced by the chiral condensate strongly aligns the Polyakov loop. This effect sets in at the chiral symmetry restoration temperature $T_χ$ and thus makes deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration coincide. The predicted singular behavior of Polyakov loop susceptibilities at $T_χ$ is shown to be supported by finite temperature lattice calculations.
The interplay of deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration are considered in terms of effective theories. We generalize the earlier model studies by considering fermions in higher representations, and study the finite temperature phase diagrams of SU(2) and SU(3) gauge theories with two fermion flavors in fundamental, adjoint or two-index symmetric representations. We discuss our results in relation to recent lattice simulations on these theories and outline possible applications in the context of dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking.
We present results on the chiral and deconfinement properties of the QCD transition at finite temperature. We performed calculations using asqtad and HISQ/tree actions using lattices with temporal extent N_tau=6, 8 and 12 allowing to control the approach to the continuum limit. We analyze the chiral transition in terms of universal O(N) scaling functions. From peaks in the scaling functions we perform a simultaneous continuum extrapolation for HISQ/tree and asqtad to derive the critical temperature, T_c= 157 +/- 6 MeV.
We compare two order parameters for the deconfinement transition, induced by thermal and density effects, commonly used in the literature, namely the thermal and density evolution of the continuum threshold $s_{0}$, within the frame of the QCD sum rules, and the trace of the Polyakov loop $Φ$ in the framework of a nonlocal $SU(2)$ chiral quark model. We include in our discussion the evolution of the chiral quark condensate, the parameter that characterizes the chiral symmetry restoration. We found that essentially both order parameters, $s_{0}$ and $Φ$, provide the same information for the dec…
We propose a simple explanation for the connection between chiral symmetry restoration and deconfinement in QCD at high temperature. In the Higgs description of the QCD vacuum both spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking and effective gluon masses are generated by the condensate of a color octet quark-antiquark pair. The transition to the high temperature state proceeds by the melting of this condensate. Quarks and gluons become (approximately) massless at the same critical temperature. For instanton-dominated effective multiquark interactions and three light quarks with equal mass we find a firs…
We present results for the chiral and deconfinement transition of two flavor QCD at finite temperature and chemical potential. To this end we study the quark condensate and its dual, the dressed Polyakov loop, with functional methods using a set of Dyson-Schwinger equations. The quark-propagator is determined self-consistently within a truncation scheme including temperature and in-medium effects of the gluon propagator. For the chiral transition we find a crossover turning into a first order transition at a critical endpoint at large quark chemical potential, $μ_{EP}/T_{EP} \approx 3$. For th…
We determine the quark condensate and the dressed Polyakov loop from the finite temperature Landau gauge quark propagator evaluated with U(1)-valued boundary conditions in an approximation to quenched QCD. These gauge invariant quantities allow for an investigation of the chiral and deconfinement transition. We compare results from Dyson-Schwinger equations on a lattice with infinite volume continuum results and study the temperature and quark mass dependence of both quantities. In particular we investigate the chiral condensate and the dressed Polyakov loop in the chiral limit. We also consid…
We show that finite-temperature deconfinement and chiral transitions can split in a strong enough magnetic field. The splitting in critical temperatures of these transitions in a constant magnetic field of a typical LHC magnitude is of the order of 10 MeV. A new deconfined phase with broken chiral symmetry appears.
The effect of quark anomalous magnetic moment (AMM) to chiral restoration and deconfinement phase transitions under magnetic fields is investigated in a Pauli-Villars regularized PNJL model. A linear-in-$B$ term for quark anomalous magnetic moment is introduced to the Lagrangian density of our model, and it plays the role of inverse catalysis to the phase transitions. With fixed magnetic field, the critical temperature decreases with quark AMM. When fixing quark AMM, the critical temperature increases with magnetic field for a small quark AMM, but decreases with magnetic field for a large quar…
We study the phase diagram of a chiral random matrix model with three quark flavors at finite temperature and chemical potential, taking the chiral and diquark condensates as independent order parameters. Fixing the ratio of the coupling strengths in the quark-antiquark and quark-quark channels applying the Fierz transformation, we find that the color-flavor locked (CFL) phase is realized at large chemical potential, while the ordinary chirally-broken phase appears in the region with small chemical potential. We investigate responses of the phases by changing small quark masses in the cases wi…
We study a gauge invariant order parameter for deconfinement and the chiral condensate in SU(2) and SU(3) Yang-Mills theory in the vicinity of the deconfinement phase transition using the Landau gauge quark and gluon propagators. We determine the gluon propagator from lattice calculations and the quark propagator from its Dyson-Schwinger equation, using the gluon propagator as input. The critical temperature and a deconfinement order parameter are extracted from the gluon propagator and from the dependency of the quark propagator on the temporal boundary conditions. The chiral transition is de…
Effects of a uniform (electro-) magnetic background field are investigated in the two-flavor nonlocal Polyakov-loop extended Nambu--Jona-Lasinio (PNJL) model. Temperature-dependences of the chiral order-parameter and the Polyakov-loop are investigated under the magnetic field. In the nonlocal PNJL model with four-dimensional momentum dependent distribution function, pseudo-critical temperatures of the chiral and deconfinement transitions are coincident each other even if the magnetic field is strong. It means that we can check the reliability of the distribution function under the strong magne…
We report preliminary results on the chiral and deconfinement aspects of the QCD transition at finite temperature using the Highly Improved Staggered Quark (HISQ) action on lattices with temporal extent of N_τ=6 and 8. The chiral aspects of the transition are studied in terms of quark condensates and the disconnected chiral susceptibility. We study the deconfinement transition in terms of the strange quark number susceptibility and the renormalized Polyakov loop. We made continuum estimates for some quantities and find reasonably good agreement between our results and the recent continuum extr…
We review how a classification into representations of color and flavor can be used to understand the possible patterns of symmetry breaking for color superconductivity in dense quark matter. In particular, we show how for three flavors, color-flavor locking is precisely analogous to the usual pattern of chiral symmetry breaking in the QCD vacuum.
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…
The deconfinement and chiral phase transitions are studied in the context of the electrized quark matter at finite temperature in the two-flavor Polyakov-Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model. Using the mean field approximation and an electric field independet regularization we show that the effect of temperature and/or electric fields is to partially restore the chiral symmetry. The deconfinement phase transition is slightly affected by the magnitude of the electric field. To this end we show how the effective quark masses and the expectation value of the Polyakov Loop are affected by the electric fields…
We study the chiral crossover, the spectra of light-light and of static-light mesons and the deconfinement crossover at finite temperature T. Our framework is the confining and chiral invariant quark model, related to truncated Coulomb gauge QCD. Since we are dealing with light quarks, where the linear potential dominates the quark condensate and the spectrum, we only specialize in the linear confining potential for the quark-antiquark interaction. We utilize T dependent string tensions previously fitted from lattice QCD data, and a fit of previously computed dynamically generated constituent …
Deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration are explored in a confining, renormalisable, Dyson-Schwinger equation model of two-flavour QCD. An order parameter for deconfinement is introduced and used to establish that, in the chiral limit, deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration are coincident at $T_c\approx 150\,$MeV. The transitions are second order and each has the same critical exponent: $β\approx 0.3$. The deconfinement transition is found to exhibit sensitivity to the current-quark mass. $f_π$ and $m_π$ change by no more than 10\% for $T<0.7\,T_c$, however, as $T\to T_c$, thermal…
The behavior of the quark condensates at zero chemical potential and finite temperature subject to an external magnetic field is studied within the three flavor Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model with Polyakov loop (PNJL) and its extension, the so-called entangled PNJL model (EPNJL). A comparison with recent lattice QCD data is performed and it is shown that at $T=0$ MeV the light quark condensates are in quantitative agreement. At finite temperature, although there is an overall reasonable agreement with several lattice results, it is shown that in the lattice calculations the effect due to the electr…
Paradigme shift in gauge topology, from instantons to their constituents -- instanton-dyons -- has recently lead to very significant advances. Like instantons, they have fermionic zero modes, and their collectivization at sufficiently high density explains the chiral symmetry breaking. Unlike instantons, these objects have electric and magnetic charges. Their back reaction on the mean value of the Polyakov line (holonomy) allows to explain the deconfinement transition. The talk summarizes recent works on the dyon ensemble, done in the mean field approximation (MFA), and also by direct numerica…
For studies of quark matter in astrophysical scenarios the thermodynamic bag model (tdBag) is commonly employed. Although successful, it does not account for dynamical chiral symmetry breaking (D$χ$SB) and repulsions due to the vector interaction which is crucial to explain recent observations of massive, two solar mass neutron stars. In Klähn & Fischer (2015) we developed the novel vBag quark matter model which takes these effects into account. This article extends vBag to finite temperatures and isospin asymmetry. Another particular feature of vBag is the determination of the deconfinement b…
The phase structure of the two-flavor Polyakov-loop extended Nambu-Jona-Lashinio model is explored at finite temperature and imaginary chemical potential with a particular emphasis on the confinement-deconfinement transition. We point out that the confined phase is characterized by a $\cos3μ_I/T$ dependence of the chiral condensate on the imaginary chemical potential while in the deconfined phase this dependence is given by $\cosμ_I/T$ and accompanied by a cusp structure induced by the Z(3) transition. We demonstrate that the phase structure of the model strongly depends on the choice of the P…
