Critical behavior towards the chiral limit at vanishing and non-vanishing chemical potentials

TL;DR

This paper investigates the critical behavior of (2+1)-flavor QCD near the chiral limit at zero and non-zero chemical potentials, analyzing fluctuations and correlations to understand phase transition properties.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the scaling behavior and estimates the curvature of the chiral phase transition line using lattice QCD simulations with HISQ fermions.

Findings

Preliminary estimate of the chiral phase transition line curvature.

Analysis of conserved charge fluctuations near the chiral limit.

Insights into universal and regular contributions to fluctuations.

Abstract

We study the scaling behavior of the (2+1)-flavor QCD crossover region towards the chiral limit with smaller-than-physical light quark mass gauge ensembles, generated using the HISQ fermion discretization. At zero chemical potential, we study the fluctuations of conserved charges and their correlations with the chiral condensate, towards the chiral limit. We analyse the role of universal and regular contributions to the above quantities. We find a preliminary estimate of the leading curvature coefficient of the chiral phase transition line using scaling arguments.