After combined character and hopping expansions and integration over the spatial gauge links, lattice QCD reduces to a three-dimensional $SU(3)$ Polyakov loop model with complicated interactions. A simple truncation of the effective theory is valid for heavy quarks on reasonably fine lattices and can be solved by linked cluster expansion in its effective couplings. This was used ealier to demonstrate the onset transition to baryon matter in the cold and dense regime. Repeating these studies for general $N_c$, one finds that for large $N_c$ the onset transition becomes first-order, and the pressure scales as $p\sim N_c$ through three consecutive orders in the hoppoing expansion. These features are consistent with the formal definition of quarkyonic matter given in the literature. We discuss the implications for $N_c=3$ and physical QCD.
We present results from simulations of Two Color QCD with two Wilson quark flavors in the presence of a quark chemical potential mu at two different lattice spacings. The equation of state, conformal anomaly, superfluid order parameter and Polyakov line are all discussed. Our results suggest that the transition from hadronic to quark matter, and that from confined to deconfined matter occur at distinct values of mu, consistent with the existence of a quarkyonic phase in this model.
We study the phase diagram of quark matter at finite temperature and density in the strong coupling lattice QCD with one species of unrooted staggered fermions including finite coupling ($1/g^2$) effects for color SU($N_c$). We find that we may have partially chiral restored medium density matter at $N_c=3$, which would correspond to the quarkyonic matter suggested at large $N_c$.
Lattice QCD with heavy quarks reduces to a three-dimensional effective theory of Polyakov loops, which is amenable to series expansion methods. We analyse the effective theory in the cold and dense regime for a general number of colours, $N_c$. In particular, we investigate the transition from a hadron gas to baryon condensation. For any finite lattice spacing, we find the transition to become stronger, i.e. ultimately first-order, as $N_c$ is made large. Moreover, in the baryon condensed regime, we find the pressure to scale as $p\sim N_c$ through three orders in the hopping expansion. Such a…
In this Addendum to our recent paper, Phys. Rev. D 77, 054027 (2008), we point out that a chiral restoration phase transition in a quarkyonic matter at low temperatures is of second order within a manifestly confining and chirally symmetric large $N_c$ model. This result is qualitatively different as compared to NJL and NJL-like models that are not confining and might have some implications for the existence or nonexistence of the critical end point in the QCD phase diagram.
We argue that in cold, dense quark matter, in the limit of a large number of colors the ground state is unstable with respect to creation of a complicated Quarkyonic Chiral Spiral (QCS) state, in which both chiral and translational symmetries are spontaneously broken. The entire Fermi surface is covered with patches of QCSs, whose number increases as the quark density does. The low energy excitations are gapless, given by Wess-Zumino-Novikov-Witten model plus transverse kinetic terms localized about different patches.
During the last years it has become possible to address the cold and dense regime of QCD directly for sufficiently heavy quarks, where combined strong coupling and hopping expansions are convergent and a 3d effective theory can be derived, which allows to control the sign problem either in simulations or by fully analytic calculations. In this contribution we review the effective theory and study the $N_c$-dependence of the nuclear liquid gas transition, as well as the equation of state of baryonic matter in the strong coupling limit. We find the transition to become more strongly first order …
The heavy quarkonium spectrum of Two Color QCD (QC$_2$D) at non-zero quark chemical potential $μ$ and temperature $T$ with $μ/T\gg1$ has been calculated in both $S$- and $P$-wave channels using a lattice non-relativistic formulation of QC$_2$D. As $μ$ is varied, the quarkonium spectra reveal three separate regions, corroborating previous findings that there are three distinct physical regimes of QC$_2$D at low temperature and high baryon density: hadronic matter, quark/quarkyonic matter, and deconfined matter. The results are interpreted in terms of the formation of heavy-light $Qq$ states in …
We study two-color QCD with two flavors of Wilson fermion as a function of quark chemical potential mu and temperature T, for two different lattice spacings and two different quark masses. We find that the quarkyonic region, where the behaviour of the quark number density and the diquark condensate are described by a Fermi sphere of almost free quarks distorted by a BCS gap, extends to larger chemical potentials with decreasing lattice spacing or quark mass. In both cases, the quark number density also approaches its non-interacting value. The pressure at low temperature is found to approach t…
It is possible that at low temperatures and large density there exists a confining matter with restored chiral symmetry, just after the dense nuclear matter with broken chiral symmetry. Such a phase has sofar been studied within a confining and chirally symmetric model assuming a rigid quark Fermi surface. In the confining quarkyonic matter, however, near the Fermi surface quarks group into color-singlet baryons. Interaction between quarks leads to a diffusion of the quark Fermi surface. Here we study effects of such diffusion and verify that it does not destroy a possible existence of a confi…
Lattice QCD simulations with chirally symmetric quarks have recently established approximate $SU(2)_{CS}$ and $SU(2N_F)$ symmetries of the quantum effective action in a temperature range above the chiral crossover $T_\mathrm{ch}$, in which color-electric interactions between quarks dominate the dynamics. We show that such an intermediate temperature range between the chirally broken and plasma regimes is fully consistent with published screening mass spectra, which demonstrate the breakdown of thermal perturbation theory at the crossover between the partonic and the chiral spin symmetric regim…
Combining strong coupling and hopping expansion one can derive a dimensionally reduced effective theory of lattice QCD. This theory has a reduced sign problem, is amenable to analytic evaluation and was successfully used to study the cold and dense regime of QCD for sufficiently heavy quarks. We show results from the evaluation of the effective theory for arbitrary $N_c$ up to $κ^4$. The inclusion of gauge corrections is also investigated. We find that the onset transition to finite baryon number density steepens with growing $N_c$ even for $T \neq 0$. This suggests that in the large $N_c$ lim…
We investigate the nuclear and the quark matter at finite real chemical potential ($μ_\mathrm{R}$) and low temperature from the viewpoint of the canonical sectors constructed via the imaginary chemical potential region. Based on the large $N_\mathrm{c}$ estimation, where $N_\mathrm{c}$ is the number of color, we can discuss the confinement-deconfinement nature at finite $μ_\mathrm{R}$ from the canonical sectors. We found the expectation that the sharp change of canonical sectors at $μ_\mathrm{R} \sim M_\mathrm{B}/N_\mathrm{c}$, where $M_\mathrm{B}$ is the lowest baryon mass, is happen in the l…
In this paper we carry out a low-temperature scan of the phase diagram of dense two-color QCD with $N_f=2$ quarks. The study is conducted using lattice simulation with rooted staggered quarks. At small chemical potential we observe the hadronic phase, where the theory is in a confining state, chiral symmetry is broken, the baryon density is zero and there is no diquark condensate. At the critical point $μ= m_π/2$ we observe the expected second order transition to Bose-Einstein condensation of scalar diquarks. In this phase the system is still in confinement in conjunction with non-zero baryon …
We compute quark and gluon propagators in 2-colour QCD at large baryon chemical potential mu. The gluon propagator is found to be antiscreened at intermediate mu and screened at large mu. The quark propagator is drastically modified in the superfluid region as a result of the formation of a superfluid gap.
The infamous sign problem makes it impossible to probe dense (baryon density $μ_B>0$) QCD at temperatures near or below the deconfinement threshold. As a workaround, one can explore QCD-like theories such as two-colour QCD (QC2D) which don't suffer from this sign problem but are qualitively similar to real QCD. Previous studies on smaller lattice volumes have investigated deconfinement and colour superfluid to normal matter transitions. In this study we look at a larger lattice volume $N_s=24$ in an attempt to disentangle finite volume and finite temperature effects. We also fit to a larger nu…
The properties of matter at finite baryon densities play an important role for the astrophysics of compact stars as well as for heavy ion collisions or the description of nuclear matter. Because of the sign problem of the quark determinant, lattice QCD cannot be simulated by standard Monte Carlo at finite baryon densities. I review alternative attempts to treat dense QCD with an effective lattice theory derived by analytic strong coupling and hopping expansions, which close to the continuum is valid for heavy quarks only, but shows all qualitative features of nuclear physics emerging from QCD.…
We have computed the chiral susceptibility in quark-gluon plasma in presence of finite chemical potential and weak magnetic field within hard thermal loop approximation. First we construct the massive effective quark propagator in a thermomagnetic medium. Then we obtain completely analytic expression for the chiral susceptibility in weak magnetic field approximation. In the absence of magnetic field the thermal chiral susceptibility increases in presence of finite chemical potential. The effect of thermomagnetic correction is found to be very marginal as temperature is the dominant scale in we…
A Coulomb gas representation of dense-matter QCD is derived from a dual transformation of the low-energy effective Lagrangian. The point-like charges Q=+1,-1 of the gas are identified with the instantons and anti-instantons of such topological charges. An instanton repels another instanton with the same force as it attracts an anti-instanton, in contrast to the semiclassical interaction.
The isospin chemical potential region is known as the sign-problem free region of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). In this paper, we introduce the isospin chemical potential to the three-dimensional three-state Potts model to mimic the dense QCD; e.g., the QCD effective model with heavy quarks at finite density. We call it as QCD-like Potts model. The QCD-like Potts model does not have the sign problem, but we can expect that it shares some properties with QCD. Since we can obtain the non-approximated Potts spin configuration at finite isospin chemical potential where the simple Metropolis algori…
Transitions between centre sectors are related to confinement in pure Yang-Mills theories. We study the impact of these transitions in QCD-like theories for which centre symmetry is explicitly broken by the presence of matter. For low temperatures, we provide numerical evidence that centre transitions do occur with matter merely providing a bias towards the trivial centre sector until centre symmetry is spontaneously broken at high temperatures. The phenomenological consequences of these transitions for dense hadron matter are illustrated in an SU(3) effective quark theory: centre dressed quar…
We review the proposal to resum the physics of hard thermal loops in the thermodynamics of the quark-gluon plasma through nonperturbative expressions for entropy and density obtained from a Phi-derivable two-loop approximation. A comparison with the recently solved large-N_f limit of hot QCD is performed, and some updates, in particular on quark number susceptibilities, are made.
We obtain the equation of state (EoS) for two-color QCD at low temperature and high density from the lattice Monte Carlo simulation. We find that the velocity of sound exceeds the relativistic limit ($c_s^2/c^2=1/3$) after BEC-BCS crossover in the superfluid phase. Such an excess of the sound velocity is previously unknown from any lattice calculations for QCD-like theories. This finding might have a possible relevance to the EoS of neutron star matter revealed by recent measurements of neutron star masses and radii.
We investigate 2-colour QCD with 2 flavours of Wilson fermion at nonzero temperature T and quark chemical potential mu, with a pion mass of 700 MeV (m_pi/m_rho=0.8). From temperature scans at fixed mu we find that the critical temperature for the superfluid to normal transition depends only very weakly on mu above the onset chemical potential, while the deconfinement crossover temperature is clearly decreasing with mu. We also present results for the Landau-gauge gluon propagator in the hot and dense medium.
Relativistic heavy-ion collisions and the lattice QCD Monte-Carlo simulations are important ``experimental'' tools for investigating the properties of the medium described by QCD under extreme conditions. After briefly examining their characteristics, I pick up the study of the critical points in QCD as an example of the research subjects that these two tools play complementary roles and discuss recent topics that have been achieved with the use of each tool.
This document is one of a series of whitepapers from the USQCD collaboration. Here, we outline the opportunities for, prospects of and challenges to the lattice QCD calculations relevant for the understanding of the phases and properties of hot-dense QCD matter. This program of lattice QCD calculations is relevant to current and upcoming heavy-ion experimental programs at RHIC and LHC.
Using Monte Carlo simulations and extended mean field theory calculations we show that the $3$-dimensional $Z_3$ spin model with complex external fields has non-monotonic spatial correlators in some regions of its parameter space. This model serves as a proxy for heavy-dense QCD in $(3+1)$ dimensions. Non-monotonic spatial correlators are intrinsically related to a complex mass spectrum and a liquid-like (or crystalline) behavior. A liquid phase could have implications for heavy-ion experiments, where it could leave detectable signals in the spatial correlations of baryons.
We investigate quantum chromodynamics with two colors at nonvanishing density using Dyson-Schwinger equations. Lattice methods do not have a complex action problem in this theory. Thus, we can benchmark our results and the effect of truncations directly by comparing with the corresponding lattice results. We do so for the gluon propagator, the chiral condensate, and the quark number density and test variations of the employed truncation to improve the agreement. Finally, we compare the effect of a truncation on the chiral and confinement/deconfinement transitions in the phase diagrams of QCD a…
Centre sector transitions in QCD-like theories with dynamical quark matter are investigated. In the hadronic phase, these transitions still take place in the infinite volume at zero temperature limit despite of the explicit breaking of the centre symmetry by the matter fields. This finding is supported by simulations of the SU(2) Yang-Mills theory with Higgs matter. The phenomenological impact of the centre sector transitions for dense but confined matter is explained: centre dressed quarks acquire Bose statistics and form a so-called Fermi-Einstein condensate. This mechanism is further illust…
QCD at finite densities of heavy quarks is investigated using the density-of-states method. The phase factor expectation value of the quark determinant is calculated to unprecedented precision as a function of the chemical potential. Results are validated using those from a reweighting approach where the latter can produce a significant signal-to-noise ratio. We confirm the particle-hole symmetry at low temperatures, find a strong sign problem at intermediate values of the chemical potential, and an inverse Silver Blaze feature for chemical potentials close to the onset value: here, the phase …
This talk summarizes recent progress in lattice QCD for dense quark matter. The emphasis is on the insights obtained from analytical results derived within chiral perturbation theory.
We analytically study two-color QCD with an even number of flavors at high baryon density. This theory is free from the fermion sign problem. Chiral symmetry is broken spontaneously by the diquark condensate. Based on the symmetry breaking pattern we construct the low-energy effective Lagrangian for the Nambu-Goldstone bosons. We identify a new epsilon-regime at high baryon density in which the quark mass dependence of the partition function can be determined exactly. We also derive Leutwyler-Smilga-type spectral sum rules for the complex eigenvalues of the Dirac operator in terms of the fermi…
Euclidean dense matter generically suffers from the fermion sign problem. However, we argue that the sign problem is absent if one considers only low-energy degrees of freedom. Specifically, the low energy effective theory of dense QCD has positive Euclidean path integral measure, which allows one to establish rigorous inequalities showing that the color-flavor locked (CFL) phase is the true vacuum of three flavor, massless QCD. We then describe a method for simulating dense QCD on the lattice. We also discuss applications to electronic systems in condensed matter, such as generalized Hubbard …
The sign problem of QCD prevents standard lattice simulations to determine the phase diagram of strong interactions with a finite chemical potential directly. Complex Langevin simulations provide an alternative method to sample path integrals with complex weights. We report on our ongoing project to determine the phase diagram of QCD in the limit of heavy quarks (HDQCD) using Complex Langevin simulations.
Monte Carlo methods cannot probe far into the QCD phase diagram with a real chemical potential, due to the famous sign problem. Complex Langevin simulations, using adaptive step-size scaling and gauge cooling, are suited for sampling path integrals with complex weights. We report here on tests of the deconfinement transition in pure Yang-Mills SU(3) simulations and present an update on the QCD phase diagram in the limit of heavy and dense quarks.
Complex Langevin simulations have been able to successfully reproduce results from Monte Carlo methods in the region where the sign problem is mild and make predictions when it is exponentially hard. We present here our study of the QCD phase diagram and the boundary between the confined and deconfined phases in the limit of heavy and dense quarks (HDQCD) for 3 different lattice volumes. We also briefly discuss instabilities encountered in our simulations.
Complex Langevin simulations provide an alternative to sample path integrals with complex weights and therefore are suited to determine the phase diagram of QCD from first principles. Adaptive step-size scaling and gauge cooling are used to improve the convergence of our simulations. We present results for the phase diagram of QCD in the limit of heavy quarks and discuss the order of the phase transitions, which are studied by varying the spatial simulation volume.
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 study the phase structure of QCD at high temperature and density by lattice QCD simulations adopting a histogram method. The quark mass dependence and the chemical potential dependence of the nature of phase transition are investigated focusing on the probability distribution function (histogram). The shape of the distribution function changes with the quark mass and chemical potential. Through the shape of the distribution, the critical surface which separates the first order transition and crossover regions in the heavy quark region is determined for the (2+1)-flavor case. Moreover, we de…
