Towards the chiral critical surface of QCD

TL;DR

This paper investigates the nature of the chiral critical surface in QCD, finding evidence that challenges the existence of a critical endpoint at moderate chemical potentials, based on lattice simulations.

Contribution

It provides lattice QCD evidence suggesting the chiral critical surface does not support a critical endpoint at moderate chemical potentials, refining the understanding of the QCD phase diagram.

Findings

Chiral transition region shrinks with increasing chemical potential on coarse lattices.

Finer lattice results show the critical surface curvature is consistent with zero.

No evidence of a chiral critical point at chemical potentials below 500 MeV.

Abstract

The critical endpoint of the QCD phase diagram is usually expected to belong to the chiral critical surface, i.e. the surface of second order transitions bounding the region of first order chiral phase transitions for small quark masses in the {m_{u,d}, m_s,\mu} parameter space. For \mu=0, QCD with physical quark masses is known to be an analytic crossover, requiring the region of chiral transitions to expand with \mu for a critical endpoint to exist. Instead, on coarse N_t=4 lattices, we find the area of chiral transitions to shrink with \mu, which excludes a chiral critical point for QCD at moderate chemical potentials \mu_B < 500 MeV. First results on finer N_t=6 lattices indicate a curvature of the critical surface consistent with zero and unchanged conclusions.