Strong coupling effective theory with heavy fermions

TL;DR

This paper extends a strong coupling effective theory to include heavy fermions and chemical potential, using numerical simulations to study deconfinement transition weakening and the critical surface across various parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate heavy fermions and chemical potential into the effective theory via hopping parameter expansion, enabling comprehensive phase diagram analysis.

Findings

Deconfinement transition weakens with decreasing quark mass.

Critical surface mapped across (M/T, mu/T, T) space.

Sign problem remains manageable in this model.

Abstract

We extend the recently developed strong coupling, dimensionally reduced Polyakov-loop effective theory from finite-temperature pure Yang-Mills to include heavy fermions and nonzero chemical potential by means of a hopping parameter expansion. Numerical simulation is employed to investigate the weakening of the deconfinement transition as a function of the quark mass. The tractability of the sign problem in this model is exploited to locate the critical surface in the (M/T, mu/T, T) space over the whole range of chemical potentials from zero up to infinity.