Deconfinement Transition at High Isospin Chemical Potential and Low Temperature

TL;DR

This paper calculates the critical temperature for the deconfinement transition in high isospin chemical potential QCD, establishing a quantitative link to pure Yang-Mills theory and providing results for future lattice validation.

Contribution

It provides the first quantitative expression for the deconfinement critical temperature at high isospin chemical potential in QCD, relating it to pure Yang-Mills theory.

Findings

Derived the energy scale for deconfinement transition as a function of isospin chemical potential.

Established the equivalence of high isospin density QCD to pure Yang-Mills theory at low temperatures.

Provided a formula for the critical temperature that can be tested with lattice simulations.

Abstract

We consider QCD with two degenerate flavors of light quarks(up and down) at asymptotically high isospin chemical potential with zero baryon chemical potential and calculate for the first time a quantitative expression for the critical temperature of the deconfinement transition in this regime. At high isospin chemical potential and sufficiently low temperatures this theory becomes equivalent to a pure Yang-Mills theory and accordingly has a first order deconfinement phase transition. Although this was conjectured in a seminal paper by Son and Stephanov in the year 2001, the critical temperature of this deconfinement phase transition was not computed. This paper computes the energy scale associated with this transition as a function of the isospin chemical potential by relating the parameters of the equivalent Yang-Mills theory to those of the underlying theory. We also relate the equation of state in one strongly interacting regime of QCD namely at finite isospin density to that in pure Yang-Mills, with the latter being amenable to straightforward numerical calculation. Our results for the critical temperature of deconfinement transition can be compared with future lattice calculations.