Approaches to QCD phase diagram; effective models, strong-coupling lattice QCD, and compact stars

TL;DR

This paper reviews various approaches to understanding the QCD phase diagram, including effective models, strong-coupling lattice QCD, and their implications for heavy-ion collisions and compact stars.

Contribution

It provides an overview of different theoretical methods to explore the QCD phase diagram, highlighting recent developments and applications to astrophysical phenomena.

Findings

Mean field treatment of NJL model elucidates basic phase diagram features.

Strong-coupling lattice QCD captures the first order phase boundary.

Discussion of asymmetric matter relevant to compact star phenomena.

Abstract

The outline of the two lectures given in "Dense Matter School 2015" is presented. After an overview on the relevance of the phase diagram to heavy-ion collisions and compact star phenomena, I show some basic formulae to discuss the QCD phase diagram in the mean field treatment of the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model. Next, I introduce the strong-coupling lattice QCD, which is one of the promising methods to access the QCD phase diagram including the first order phase boundary. In the last part, I discuss the QCD phase diagram in asymmetric matter, which should be formed in compact star phenomena.