The chiral critical point from the strong coupling expansion

TL;DR

This paper extends the strong coupling expansion for staggered fermions to include higher-order corrections, enabling the study of the chiral critical point's dependence on the gauge coupling in the phase diagram.

Contribution

It introduces a mapping to a vertex model to incorporate $eta$ corrections, advancing the analysis of the chiral critical point in lattice QCD.

Findings

Chiral critical point shifts with $eta$ corrections.

Extended the strong coupling framework to higher orders.

Provided insights into the phase diagram at finite density.

Abstract

The strong coupling expansion for staggered fermions allows for Monte Carlo simulations using a dual representation. It has a mild sign problem for low values of the inverse gauge coupling $\beta$, hence the phase diagram in the full $\mu_B - T$ plane can be evaluated. We have extended this framework to include $\mathcal{O}(\beta)$ and $\mathcal{O}(\beta^2)$ corrections, by mapping the degrees of freedom to a vertex model. We present results on the $\beta$-dependence of the chiral critical point from those simulations.