Chiral symmetry crossover with a linear confining and temperature dependent quark-antiquark potential

TL;DR

This paper extends a numerical model to finite temperatures, analyzing chiral symmetry crossover in quark-antiquark systems using temperature-dependent string tension data from Lattice QCD.

Contribution

It introduces a finite-temperature upgrade to a chiral invariant quark model incorporating temperature-dependent string tension from Lattice QCD.

Findings

Quark mass and chiral condensate vanish at T=Tc for light quarks.

The quark mass critical curve resembles the string tension critical curve.

The model successfully describes chiral crossover behavior at finite temperature.

Abstract

Recently we developed a numerical technique to compute chiral symmetry breaking at T=0 with different current quark masses m0, including the current quark masses of the six standard flavours u, d, s, c, b, t. We also fitted from Lattice QCD data the quark-antiquark string tension sigma dependence on temperature T. We now utilize sigma(T) to further upgrade the chiral invariant and confinement quark model to finite temperatures T =/= 0. We study the quark mass at finite T and obtain the corresponding chiral crossover at T=Tc. The quark mass critical curve has a shape similar, but not identical, to the string tension critical curve. In the case of the lightest quarks, the quark mass and the chiral condensate essentially vanish at T=Tc, except for the small explicit chiral symmetry breaking mu and md.