Related papers: Critical structure of the QCD medium
We discuss the phase structure of QCD for $N_f=2$ and $N_f=2+1$ dynamical quark flavours at finite temperature and baryon chemical potential. It emerges dynamically from the underlying fundamental interactions between quarks and gluons in…
We introduce an effective quark-meson-nucleon model for the QCD phase transitions at finite baryon density. The nucleon and the quark degrees of freedom are described within a unified framework of a chiral linear sigma model. The…
The intention of this study is the search for signatures of the chiral phase transition in heavy-ion collisions. To investigate the impact of fluctuations, e.g., of the baryon number, at the transition or at a critical point, the linear…
We explore the influence of heavy quarks on the deconfinement phase transition in an effective model for gluons interacting with dynamical quarks in color SU(3). With decreasing quark mass, the strength of the explicit breaking of the Z(3)…
Studies of the QCD phase diagram must properly include nucleonic degrees of freedom and their thermodynamics in the range of baryon chemical potentials characteristic of nuclear matter. A useful framework for incorporating relevant nuclear…
While the Polyakov loop is an order parameter of the deconfinement transition in the heavy quark mass regime of QCD, its sensitivity to the deconfinement of light, dynamical quarks in QCD is not apparent. On the other hand, the quark mass…
The exploration of the Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) phase diagram is a central goal of relativistic heavy-ion collision experiments. This review focuses on the role of fluctuations and correlations as sensitive probes of the phase…
We analyze the many-flavor phase diagram of quantum electrodynamics (QED) in 2+1 (Euclidean) space-time dimensions. We compute the critical flavor number above which the theory is in the quasi-conformal massless phase. For this, we study…
We investigate the impact of finite volume and the corresponding restrictions on long-range correlations on the location of the critical endpoint in the QCD phase diagram. To this end, we employ a sophisticated combination of lattice…
We develop theoretical diagnostics for the breakdown of mean-field theory, demonstrate how spatial structure and finite interaction ranges enter the effective description, and show how these scales qualitatively modify the…
The Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) phase structure has been studied using the Polyakov-loop augmented quark-meson model (PQM) in the extended mean field approximation (e-MFA) where the quark one-loop vacuum term is included.~When the…
The phase diagram of two-color QCD with a chiral chemical potential is studied on the lattice. The focus is on the confinement/deconfinement phase transition and the breaking/restoration of chiral symmetry. The simulations are carried out…
We employ the linear sigma model to study the chiral dynamics of two flavors of quarks at finite temperature and density. Our calculations include thermal fluctuations of both the bosonic and fermionic fields. In particular, we determine…
If the fermion mass is large enough, the phase of the fermion determinant of QCD at finite density is strongly correlated with the imaginary part of the Polyakov loop. This fact can be exploited to reduce the fluctuations of the phase…
We determine the phase diagram of QCD on the \mu-T plane for small to moderate chemical potentials. Two transition lines are defined with two quantities, the chiral condensate and the strange quark number susceptibility. The calculations…
Based on the analogy between the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model of chiral symmetry breaking and the BCS theory of superconductivity, we investigate the effect of $\bar q q$ pair fluctuations on the chiral phase transition. We include uncondensed…
The kinetics of the chiral phase transition is studied within a linear quark-meson-$\sigma$ model, using a Monte-Carlo approach to semiclassical particle-field dynamics. The meson fields are described on the mean-field level and quarks and…
We study order parameters for the confinement-deconfinement phase transition related to the Polyakov-loop variable. The functional renormalisation group is used to compute these order parameters in a unified, non-perturbative continuum…
Fluctuations are included in a chiral nucleon-meson model within the framework of the functional renormalization group. The model, with parameters fitted to reproduce the nuclear liquid-gas phase transition, is used to study the phase…
The Polyakov linear sigma model (PLSM) is used to investigate the respective influence of a finite volume and a magnetic field on the quark-hadron phase boundary in the plane of baryon chemical potential ($\mu_{B}$) vs. temperature ($T$) of…