We study the signs of criticality in conserved charge fluctuations and related observables of finite temperature QCD at vanishing chemical potential, as we approach the chiral limit of two light quarks. Our calculations have been performed on gauge ensembles generated using Highly Improved Staggered Quark (HISQ) fermion action, with pion masses ranging from 140 MeV to 55 MeV.
Above a pseudocritical temperature of chiral symmetry restoration T_c the energy and the pressure are very far from the quark-gluon-plasma limit (i.e. ideal gas of free quarks and gluons). At the same time very soon above T_c fluctuations of conserved charges behave as if quarks were free particles. Within the T_c - 3T_c interval a chiral spin symmetry emerges in QCD which is not consistent with free quarks and suggests that degrees of freedom are chirally symmetric quarks bound into the color-singlet objects by the chromoelectric field. Here we analyse temporal and spatial correlators in this…
We discuss the role of repulsive baryon-baryon interactions in a hadron gas using relativistic virial expansion and repulsive mean field approaches. The fluctuations of the baryon number as well as strangeness-baryon correlations are calculated in the hadron resonance gas with repulsive interactions and compared with the recent lattice QCD results. In particular, we calculate the difference between the second and fourth order fluctuations and correlations of baryon number and strangeness, that have been proposed as probes of deconfinement. We show that for not too high temperatures these diffe…
We update lattice QCD results for second order cumulants of conserved charge fluctuations and correlations at non-zero temperature and vanishing values of the conserved charge chemical potentials. We compare these results to hadron resonance gas calculations with and without excluded volume terms as well as S-matrix results in the hadronic phase of QCD, and comment on their current limitations. We, furthermore, use these results to characterize thermal conditions in the vicinity of the pseudo-critical line of the chiral transition in QCD. We argue that the ratio of strange to baryon chemical p…
We present here continuum extrapolated results for all 2nd order cumulants using the most recent results obtained by the HotQCD collaboration in (2+1)-flavor QCD. We constrain the applicability of various HRG models by presenting a detailed comparison of our results based on different sets of hadron spectra as well as with virial expansion based model calculations. A comparison with our lattice QCD results for 2nd order cumulants with models that parametrize repulsive interactions among baryons and anti-baryons in a hadron resonance gas through a single excluded volume parameter (EVHRG) is als…
We present results from lattice QCD calculations for $2^{nd}$ and $4^{th}$ order cumulants of conserved charge fluctuations and correlations, and compare these with various HRG model calculations. We show that differences between HRG and QCD calculations already show up in the second order cumulants close to the pseudo-critical temperature for the chiral transition in (2+1)-flavor QCD and quickly grow large at higher temperatures. We also show that QCD results for strangeness fluctuations are enhanced over HRG model calculations which are based only on particles listed in the Particle Data Gro…
We present results from calculations of conserved charge fluctuations in $(2+1)$-flavor QCD using light quark masses in the range $m_s/80 \leq m_l \leq m_s/27$, with the strange quark mass ($m_s$) kept fixed at its physical value. This corresponds to a Goldstone pion mass in the range $80$ MeV $\leq m_π\leq 140$ MeV. The measurements have been done using HISQ fermion discretization and Symanzik improved gauge action. We discuss the quark mass dependence of up to 6th order cumulants and present first results on the separation of singular and regular contributions to these cumulants. From these …
We calculate several diagonal and non-diagonal fluctuations of conserved charges in a system of 2+1+1 quark flavors with physical masses, on a lattice with size $48^3\times12$. Higher order fluctuations at $μ_B=0$ are obtained as derivatives of the lower order ones, simulated at imaginary chemical potential. From these correlations and fluctuations we construct ratios of net-baryon number cumulants as functions of temperature and chemical potential, which satisfy the experimental conditions of strangeness neutrality and proton/baryon ratio. Our results qualitatively explain the behavior of the…
We present the first lattice QCD results of the second order fluctuations of and correlations among net baryon number, electric charge and strangeness in (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD in the presence of a background magnetic field with physical pion mass $m_π=135$ MeV. To mimic the magnetic field strength produced in the early stage of heavy-ion collision experiments we use 6 different values of the magnetic field strength up to $ \sim $10$m_π^2$. We find that the correlations between baryon number and electric charge along the transition line are substantially affected by magnetic fields in the cu…
Using high-statistics datasets generated in (2+1)-flavor QCD calculations at finite temperature we construct estimators for the radius of convergence from an eighth order series expansion of the pressure as well as the number density. We show that the estimator for pressure and number density will be identical in the asymptotic limit. In the vicinity of the pseudo-critical temperature, $T_{pc}\simeq 156.5$~MeV, we find the estimator of the radius of convergence to be $μ_B/T \gtrsim\ 3$ for strangeness-neutral matter. We also present results for the pole structure of the Padé approximants for t…
Using high statistics datasets generated in (2+1)-flavor QCD calculations at finite temperature we present results for low order cumulants of net baryon-number fluctuations at non-zero values of the baryon chemical potential. We calculate Taylor expansions for the pressure (zeroth order cumulant), net baryon-number density (first order cumulant) and the variance of the distribution on net-baryon number fluctuations (second order cumulant). We obtain series expansions from an eighth order expansion of the pressure and compare these to diagonal Padé approximants. This allows us to estimate the r…
Quark Number Susceptibilities and Conserved Charge Fluctuations in $(2+1)$-flavor QCD with Möbius domain-wall fermions (MDWF)
Universität Bielefeld(比勒费尔德大学);RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS)(理化学研究所计算科学中心);Osaka University(大阪大学);High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK)(高能加速器研究机构);Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI)(综合研究大学院大学)
We compute the free energy in the presence of a chemical potential coupled to a conserved charge in the effective SU(N)xSU(N) scalar field theory to third order for asymmetric volumes in general d-dimensions, using dimensional regularization. We also compute the mass gap in a finite box with periodic boundary conditions.