On confinement and chiral symmetry critical points

TL;DR

This paper investigates the QCD phase diagram focusing on the critical points of confinement and chiral symmetry breaking, using a quark potential model that incorporates both phenomena and is informed by lattice QCD data.

Contribution

It introduces a quark potential model within the Coulomb gauge Hamiltonian formalism that simultaneously includes confinement and chiral symmetry breaking, addressing their critical points.

Findings

The model successfully describes the influence of quark masses on the critical points.

It connects lattice QCD data with the phase transition analysis.

The study clarifies how confinement and chiral symmetry breaking transitions relate at different densities.

Abstract

We study the QCD phase diagram, in particular we study the critical points of the two main QCD phase transitions, confinement and chiral symmetry breaking. Confinement drives chiral symmetry breaking, and, due to the finite quark mass, at small density both transitions are a crossover, while they are a first or second order phase transition in large density. We study the QCD phase diagram with a quark potential model including both confinement and chiral symmetry. This formalism, in the Coulomb gauge hamiltonian formalism of QCD, is presently the only one able to microscopically include both a quark-antiquark confining potential and a vacuum condensate of quark-antiquark pairs. This model is able to address all the excited hadrons, and chiral symmetry breaking, at the same token. Our order parameters are the Polyakov loop and the quark mass gap. The confining potential is extracted from the Lattice QCD data of the Bielefeld group. We address how the quark masses affect the critical point location in the phase diagram.