Strong magnetic fields in nonlocal chiral quark models

TL;DR

This paper investigates how strong magnetic fields influence phase transitions in nonlocal chiral quark models, providing insights consistent with lattice QCD results on inverse magnetic catalysis.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed formalism for nonlocal Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio models under magnetic fields, analyzing chiral and deconfinement transitions at various temperatures.

Findings

Chiral restoration and deconfinement occur at similar critical temperatures.

Models reproduce inverse magnetic catalysis observed in lattice QCD.

Magnetic fields significantly affect the phase structure of strongly interacting matter.

Abstract

We study the behavior of strongly interacting matter under a uniform intense external magnetic field in the context of nonlocal extensions of the Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model. A detailed description of the formalism is presented, considering the cases of zero and finite temperature. In particular, we analyze the effect of the magnetic field on the chiral restoration and deconfinement transitions, which are found to occur at approximately the same critical temperatures. Our results show that these models offer a natural framework to account for the phenomenon of inverse magnetic catalysis found in lattice QCD calculations.