Related papers: Complex saddle points in QCD at finite temperature…
The Polyakov loop has been used repeatedly as an order parameter in the deconfinement phase transition in QCD. We argue that, in the confined phase, its expectation value can be represented in terms of hadronic states, similarly to the…
We extend the recently developed strong coupling, dimensionally reduced Polyakov-loop effective theory from finite-temperature pure Yang-Mills to include heavy fermions and nonzero chemical potential by means of a hopping parameter…
Since the incident nuclei in heavy-ion collisions do not carry strangeness, the global net strangeness of the detected hadrons has to vanish. We investigate the impact of strangeness neutrality on the phase structure and thermodynamics of…
In preparation of lattice studies of the two-color QCD phase diagram we study chiral restoration and deconfinement at finite temperature with two flavors of staggered quarks using an RHMC algorithm on GPUs. We first study unquenching…
We study two effective theories for QCD at non-zero temperature and finite chemical potential, using local Polyakov loops as the degrees of freedom. The sign problem is solved by exactly mapping the partition function to a sum over flux and…
We analyse the role of the quark backreaction on the gauge-field dynamics and its impact on the Polyakov-loop potential. Based on our analysis we construct an improved Polyakov-loop potential that can be used in future model studies. In the…
We construct a novel observable for finite temperature QCD that relates confinement and chiral symmetry. It uses phases as boundary conditions for the fermions. We discuss numerical and analytical aspects of this observable, like its…
We present a recent development towards a unified description of quark-hadron matter in the QCD phase diagram that is based on a cluster decomposition of the generalized Beth-Uhlenbeck approach to quark matter, selfconsistently coupled to…
We studied a crucial but often oversimplified ingredient in predicting gravitational-wave signals from QCD-type phase transitions: the kinetic term of the Polyakov loop. For the first time, we derive this term from first principles in…
Monte-Carlo simulations of abelian projection in $T \neq 0$ pure lattice QCD show that 1)\ Polyakov loops written in terms of abelian link fields alone play a role of an order parameter of deconfinement transition 2)\ the abelian Polyakov…
Recently lattice simulation in pure Yang-Mills theory exposes significant quadratic corrections for both the thermodynamic quantities and the renormalized Polyakov loop in the deconfined phase. These terms are previously found to appear…
We discuss color screening in 2+1 flavor QCD in terms of free energies of a static quark-antiquark pair. Thermal modifications of long distance correlations in quark-antiquark systems are studied in terms of static meson correlators. We…
There has been recent interest in understanding the all loop structure of the subleading power soft and collinear limits, with the goal of achieving a systematic resummation of subleading power infrared logarithms. Most of this work has…
We derive a general effective action for quark matter at nonzero temperature and/or nonzero density. For this purpose, we distinguish irrelevant from relevant quark modes, as well as hard from soft gluon modes by introducing two separate…
In quark-gluon plasma (QGP), at high temperature the spontaneous generation of color magnetic fields, H^3(T), H^8(T) and usual magnetic field $H(T) is realized. Also, classical field - A_0(T) condensate directly related to the Polyakov loop…
The mixing between the chiral condensate and the density in hot and dense QCD matter is familiar. We show that the mixing relevant for the ground state is considerably more extensive, and in particular also involves gluonic degrees of…
We describe multiquark clusters in quark matter within a Beth-Uhlenbeck approach in a background gluon field coupled to the underlying chiral quark dynamics using the Polyakov gauge which establishes the center symmetry of color SU(3) that…
We consider the intersection of N different interfaces interpolating between different $Z_N$ vacua of an SU(N) gauge theory using the Polyakov loop order parameter. Topological arguments show that at such a string-like junction, the order…
The thermodynamic singularities of QCD in the plane of complex baryo-chemical potential mu are studied. Predictions are made using scaling and universality arguments in the vicinity of the massless quark limit. The results are illustrated…
A QCD based effective action is constructed to describe the dynamics of confinement and symmetry breaking in the process of parton-hadron conversion. The deconfined quark and gluon degrees of freedom of the perturbative QCD vacuum are…