Chiral phase transition at finite chemical potential in 2+1-flavor soft-wall AdS/QCD

TL;DR

This paper uses a holographic AdS/QCD model to study how the chiral phase transition in QCD depends on quark masses and chemical potential, finding no critical point at finite chemical potential within this model.

Contribution

It extends a three-flavor soft-wall AdS/QCD model to analyze the impact of finite chemical potential on the chiral phase transition, reproducing the Columbia Plot at zero chemical potential.

Findings

Chemical potential does not alter the critical line between transition types.

No critical point is observed in this holographic model at finite chemical potential.

The model suggests the need for alternative approaches to fully capture the QCD phase diagram.

Abstract

The phase transition from hadronic matter to chirally-symmetric quark-gluon plasma is expected to be a rapid crossover at zero quark chemical potential ($\mu$), becoming first order at some finite value of $\mu$, indicating the presence of a critical point. Using a three-flavor soft-wall model of AdS/QCD, we investigate the effect of varying the light and strange quark masses on the order of the chiral phase transition. At zero quark chemical potential, we reproduce the Columbia Plot, which summarizes the results of lattice QCD and other holographic models. We then extend this holographic model to examine the effects of finite quark chemical potential. We find that the the chemical potential does not affect the critical line that separates first-order from rapid crossover transitions. This excludes the possibility of a critical point in this model, suggesting that a different setup is necessary to reproduce all the features of the QCD phase diagram.