Universal aspects of the phase diagram of QCD with heavy quarks

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates universal properties of the QCD phase diagram in the heavy quark limit, showing that critical quark masses and temperatures are largely independent of gluon dynamics across various models and simulations.

Contribution

It reveals a universal flavor dependence of the critical quark masses and temperature in the heavy quark limit, valid across multiple models and supported by lattice data.

Findings

Critical quark masses are insensitive to gluon dynamics.

Critical temperature remains constant along the critical line.

Universal law for flavor dependence of critical mass is proposed.

Abstract

The flavor dependence of the QCD phase diagram presents universal properties in the heavy quark limit. For the wide class of models where the quarks are treated at the one-loop level, we show, for arbitrary chemical potential, that the flavor dependence of the critical quark masses-for which the confinement-deconfinement transition is second order-is insensitive to the details of the (confining) gluon dynamics and that the critical temperature is constant along the corresponding critical line. We illustrate this with explicit results in various such one-loop models studied in the literature: effective matrix models for the Polyakov loop, the Curci-Ferrari model, and a recently proposed Gribov-Zwanziger-type model. We further observe that the predictions which follow from this one-loop universality property are well satisfied by different calculations beyond one-loop order, including lattice simulations. For degenerate quarks, we propose a simple universal law for the flavor dependence of the critical mass, satisfied by all approaches.