QCD Phase Transition in a Strong Magnetic Background

TL;DR

This study examines how strong magnetic fields influence the deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration transitions in two-flavor QCD using lattice simulations, finding that transition temperatures slightly increase and become sharper with stronger fields.

Contribution

It provides new lattice QCD results on the effects of magnetic fields on phase transitions, exploring a range of quark masses and magnetic field strengths.

Findings

Transition temperatures increase slightly with magnetic field.

Transitions become sharper as magnetic field strength grows.

Deconfinement and chiral restoration remain closely linked.

Abstract

We investigate the properties of the deconfining/chiral restoring transition for two flavor QCD in presence of a uniform background magnetic field. We adopt a standard staggered discretization of the fermion action and a lattice spacing of the order of 0.3 fm. We explore different values of the bare quark mass, corresponding to pion masses in the range 200 - 480 MeV, and magnetic fields up to |e|B ~ 0.75 GeV^2. The deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration temperatures remain compatible with each other and rise very slightly (< 2 % for our largest magnetic field) as a function of the magnetic field. On the other hand, the transition seems to become sharper as the magnetic field increases.