QCD: Restoration of Chiral Symmetry and Deconfinement for Large N_f

TL;DR

This paper investigates how increasing the number of light quark flavors in QCD leads to chiral symmetry restoration and deconfinement, using lattice results and gap equation modeling, identifying a critical flavor number around 8.

Contribution

It models chiral symmetry breaking and confinement in QCD with varying flavors, providing evidence for a critical flavor number for symmetry restoration and deconfinement.

Findings

Chiral symmetry is restored when N_f exceeds approximately 8.

Deconfinement occurs alongside chiral symmetry restoration at the critical N_f.

Results agree with recent lattice analyses of QCD with many flavors.

Abstract

Exploiting the recent lattice results for the infrared gluon propagator with light dynamical quarks, we solve the gap equation for the quark propagator. We thus model the chiral symmetry breaking mechanism with increasing number of flavours and study confinement (intimately tied with the analytic properties of QCD Schwinger functions) order parameters. We obtain, with this approach, clear signals of chiral symmetry restoration and deconfinement when the number of light quark flavors exceeds a critical value of $N_f^c \approx 8 \pm 1$, in agreement with the state-of-the-art direct lattice analysis of chiral symmetry restoration in QCD.