Phase structure of three and four flavor QCD

TL;DR

This paper explores the phase diagram of QCD with 3 and 4 flavors at finite temperature and chemical potential, using Dyson-Schwinger equations, and finds minimal impact of charm quarks on the phase structure.

Contribution

It extends previous Dyson-Schwinger equation studies to include charm quarks and compares results with lattice QCD, providing insights into the phase diagram and critical end-point.

Findings

Excellent agreement with lattice-QCD at zero chemical potential

Charm quarks have minimal influence on the phase diagram

Identification of the critical end-point location

Abstract

We investigate the phase structure of QCD at finite temperature and light-quark chemical potential. We improve upon earlier results for N_f=2+1 dynamical quark flavors and investigate the effects of charm quarks in an extension to N_f=2+1+1. We determine the quark condensate and the Polyakov loop potential using solutions of a coupled set of (truncated) Dyson-Schwinger equations for the quark and gluon propagators of Landau gauge QCD. At zero chemical potential we find excellent agreement with results from lattice-QCD. With input fixed from physical observables we find only a very small influence of the charm quark on the resulting phase diagram at finite chemical potential. We discuss the location of the emerging critical end-point and compare with expectations from lattice gauge theory.