Chiral and deconfinement phase transitions of two-flavour QCD at finite temperature and chemical potential

TL;DR

This paper investigates the chiral and deconfinement phase transitions in two-flavor QCD at finite temperature and chemical potential using Dyson-Schwinger equations, revealing a crossover turning into a first-order transition at a critical endpoint.

Contribution

It provides a self-consistent analysis of the phase transitions in two-flavor QCD with functional methods, identifying the critical endpoint and transition behaviors.

Findings

Chiral transition changes from crossover to first order at the critical endpoint.

Deconfinement and chiral transitions coincide near the critical endpoint.

Pseudo-critical temperature for deconfinement is above the chiral transition in the crossover region.

Abstract

We present results for the chiral and deconfinement transition of two flavor QCD at finite temperature and chemical potential. To this end we study the quark condensate and its dual, the dressed Polyakov loop, with functional methods using a set of Dyson-Schwinger equations. The quark-propagator is determined self-consistently within a truncation scheme including temperature and in-medium effects of the gluon propagator. For the chiral transition we find a crossover turning into a first order transition at a critical endpoint at large quark chemical potential, $\mu_{EP}/T_{EP} \approx 3$. For the deconfinement transition we find a pseudo-critical temperature above the chiral transition in the crossover region but coinciding transition temperatures close to the critical endpoint.