Magnetic susceptibility of the QCD vacuum at finite quark-chemical potential

TL;DR

This paper studies how the magnetic susceptibility of the QCD vacuum changes with increasing quark-chemical potential, revealing a sharp decline at the critical point and indicating a magnetic phase transition and chiral restoration.

Contribution

It provides the first analysis of the magnetic susceptibility's behavior at finite chemical potential using a nonlocal chiral quark model derived from the instanton vacuum.

Findings

Magnetic susceptibility remains stable up to mu~200 MeV

Sharp decline of susceptibility near mu_c~320 MeV

First-order magnetic phase transition at the critical point

Abstract

We investigate the QCD magnetic susceptibility chi at the finite quark-chemical potential (mu>0) and at zero temperature (T=0) to explore the pattern of the magnetic phase transition of the QCD vacuum. For this purpose, we employ the nonlocal chiral quark model derived from the instanton vacuum in the presence of the chemical potential in the chiral limit. Focusing on the Nambu-Goldstone phase, we find that the magnetic susceptibility remains almost stable to mu~200 MeV, and falls down drastically until the the quark-chemical potential reaches the critical point mu_c~320 MeV. Then, the strength of the chi is reduced to be about a half of that at mu=0, and the first-order magnetic phase transition takes place, corresponding to the chiral restoration. From these observations, we conclude that the response of the QCD vacuum becomes weak and unstable to the external electromagnetic field near the critical point, in comparison to that for vacuum. It is also shown that the breakdown of Lorentz invariance for the magnetic susceptibility, caused by the finite chemical potential, turns out to be small.