Finite density lattice QCD usually relies on extrapolations in baryon chemical potential (μB), be it Taylor expansion, T' expansion (\cite{Borsanyi:2021sxv}) or analytical continuation. However, their range of validity is difficult to control. In the canonical formulation, the baryon density is the parameter of the system, not μB. Here we demonstrate that we can access finite density QCD in the canonical formulation with physical quark masses. We present first results with both the strangeness (nS) and baryon (nB) densities as parameters. Specifically, we compute the QCD pressure and chemical potentials as functions of nB and nS. Our computations rely on high-statistics simulations with 2+1 4HEX-staggered fermions.
@article{arxiv.2512.09415,
title = {Finite density lattice QCD without extrapolations},
author = {Alexander Adam and Szabolcs Borsányi and Zoltán Fodor and Jana N. Guenther and Paolo Parotto and Attila Pásztor and Ludovica Pirelli and Chik Him Wong},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.09415},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
4 pages, 3 figures. Proceeding of Quark matter 2025