Universal Aspects of QCD-like Theories

TL;DR

This paper reviews how universality and scaling concepts help understand chiral and deconfinement transitions in QCD-like theories, using models and exact results from related spin systems.

Contribution

It introduces methods to study phase transitions in QCD-like theories through universality and scaling, including a quark-hadron model and analysis of lower-dimensional gauge theories.

Findings

Universal aspects of deconfinement in 2+1D SU(N) gauge theories

Application of the functional renormalization group to two-color QCD

Use of spin model results to understand phase transitions

Abstract

In these lectures I review some basic examples of how the concepts of universality and scaling can be used to study aspects of the chiral and the deconfinement transition, if not in QCD directly but in QCD-like theories. As an example for flavor dynamics I discuss a quark-hadron model to describe the phase diagram of two-color QCD with the functional renormalization group. Universal aspects of deconfinement are illustrated mainly in the 2+1 dimensional SU(N) gauge theories with second order transition where many exact results from spin models can be exploited.