Related papers: Large $N_c$ QCD phase diagram at $\mu_B = 0$
The hadronic matter described as a skyrmion matter embedded in an FCC crystal is found to turn into a half-skyrmion matter with vanishing (in the chiral limit) quark condensate and {\em non-vanishing} pion decay constant at a density…
The large N_c N=4 gauge theory with quenched N=2 quark matter in the presence of a magnetic field displays chiral symmetry breaking. We study the temperature and chemical potential dependence of this theory using its gravity dual (based on…
2-color QCD (quantum chromodynamics with N_c=2) at finite temperature T and chemical potential \mu is revisited in the strong coupling limit on the lattice with staggered fermions. The phase structure in the space of T, \mu, and the quark…
I review recent developments in determining the QCD phase diagram by means of lattice simulations. Since the invention of methods to side-step the sign problem a few years ago, a number of additional variants have been proposed, and…
A distinctive feature of the presence of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in QCD is the condensation of low modes of the Dirac operator near the origin. The rate of condensation must be equal to the slope of (Mpi^2 Fpi^2)/2 with respect…
The phase diagram of two-color QCD as a function of temperature and baryon chemical potential is considered. Using a low-energy chiral Lagrangian based on the symmetries of the microscopic theory, we determine, at the one-loop level, the…
The gluon and quark collisional widths in hot QCD plasmas are discussed with emphasis on temperatures near Tc, where the coupling is large. Considering the effect on the entropy, which is known from lattice calculations, it is argued that…
A QCD phase transition in the early universe could have left inhomogeneities in the baryon to photon ratio and in isospin that might have affected nucleosynthesis later on. At very high temperature QCD plasma can be described by…
The onset of thermalization in heavy ion collisions in the weak coupling framework can be viewed as a transition from the initial state Color Glass Condensate dynamics, characterized by the energy density scaling like $\epsilon \sim 1/\tau$…
In these lectures, I will attempt a pedagogical and qualitative introduction to the theory of equilibrium and thermalization of quark-gluon plasmas. I assume only that the reader is familiar with quantum field theory at zero temperature and…
We study lattice QCD in the limit that the quark mass and chemical potential are simultaneously made large, resulting in a controllable density of quarks which do not move. This is similar in spirit to the quenched approximation for zero…
The temperature dependence of quark and gluon condensates in QCD as precursor of the chiral and deconfining phase transition is modelled with a conformally extended non-linear sigma-model including broken chiral and scale invariance. The…
We derive some rigorous results on the chiral phase transition in QCD and QCD-like theories with a large number of colors, Nc, based on the QCD inequalities and the large-Nc orbifold equivalence. We show that critical phenomena and…
We review recent lattice QCD results for the surface tension at the finite temperature quark-hadron phase transition and discuss their implications on the possible scale of inhomogeneities. In the quenched approximation the average distance…
We investigate the order of the QCD chiral transition in the limit of vanishing bare up/down quark masses and variations of the bare strange-quark mass $0 \le m_{\mathrm{s}} \le \infty$. In this limit and due to universality long range…
It is argued that there are two phases in QCD distinguished by different choices of the gauge parameter. In one phase the color confinement is realized and gluons turn out to be massive, whereas in the other phase it ceases to be realized,…
High-energy heavy-ion collisions provide a unique opportunity to study the properties of the hot and dense strongly-interacting system composed of deconfined quarks and gluons -- the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) -- in laboratory conditions. The…
Assuming a Gaussian approximation for the QCD gluodynamics, all the nonperturbative physics can be encoded into two parameters: the gluon correlation length $T_g$ and the gluon condensate $G_2$. These parameters are sufficient in order to…
We present a unified approach to the thermodynamics of hadron-quark-gluon matter at finite temperatures on the basis of a quark cluster expansion in the form of a generalized Beth-Uhlenbeck approach with a generic ansatz for the hadronic…
Although at temperatures $T\gg \Lambda_{QCD}$ the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is a gas of weakly interacting quasiparticles (modulo long-range magnetism), it is strongly interacting (sQGP) in the temperature range $(1-3) T_c$. One aspect of…