Phase structure of three and four flavor QCD
Abstract
We investigate the phase structure of QCD at finite temperature and light-quark chemical potential. We improve upon earlier results for N_f=2+1 dynamical quark flavors and investigate the effects of charm quarks in an extension to N_f=2+1+1. We determine the quark condensate and the Polyakov loop potential using solutions of a coupled set of (truncated) Dyson-Schwinger equations for the quark and gluon propagators of Landau gauge QCD. At zero chemical potential we find excellent agreement with results from lattice-QCD. With input fixed from physical observables we find only a very small influence of the charm quark on the resulting phase diagram at finite chemical potential. We discuss the location of the emerging critical end-point and compare with expectations from lattice gauge theory.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1405.4762,
title = {Phase structure of three and four flavor QCD},
author = {Christian S. Fischer and Jan Luecker and Christian A. Welzbacher},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.4762},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
10 pages, 9 figures, v2: typos corrected, minor changes, version accepted by PRD