Fluctuation effects on QCD phase diagram at strong coupling

TL;DR

This paper investigates the QCD phase diagram beyond the strong coupling limit by incorporating fluctuation effects and next-to-leading order corrections using the auxiliary field Monte-Carlo method, revealing significant impacts on the chiral condensate.

Contribution

It introduces an effective action including NLO finite coupling and fluctuation effects, and analyzes their influence on the QCD phase diagram at zero quark density.

Findings

Chiral condensate is reduced by NLO and fluctuation effects.

Almost no dependence on NLO spatial plaquette terms.

Modification of mass and wave function renormalization explains behaviors.

Abstract

We study the QCD phase diagram away from the strong coupling limit (SCL) with fluctuation effects in the auxiliary field Monte-Carlo (AFMC) method. First, we give an effective action which contains next-to-leading order (NLO) finite coupling effects of the strong coupling expansion as well as fluctuation effects. Second, we examine NLO effects of the strong coupling expansion in AFMC at zero quark density. We find that the chiral condensate is reduced by both NLO terms from temporal plaquettes and fluctuation effects, and almost no dependence on NLO terms from spatial plaquettes in the current analysis. These behaviors can be understood from the modification of the mass and the wave function renormalization factor by auxiliary fields as in the mean field analysis and the fluctuation effects in the strong coupling limit.