Frankfurt 2014 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 13: Schwerionenkollisionen und QCD Phasen

HK 13.5: Talk

Monday, March 17, 2014, 17:45–18:00, HZ 7

The order of the chiral phase transition in an effective model for two-flavor QCD from the Functional Renormalization Group — •Mara Grahl — Institute for Theoretical Physics, Goethe University, Max-von-Laue-Str. 1, 60438 Frankfurt am Main

Quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory describing the strong interaction between the building blocks of hadronic matter (quarks and gluons), predicts that at high temperature and/or density hadronic matter undergoes a transition to an exotic state of matter, called quark-gluon plasma (QGP), which is associated with a chiral phase transition. In absence of any small expansion parameter, strongly coupled systems, such as QCD near the transition to the QGP, indispensably depend on nonperturbative methods such as for example the Functional Renormalization Group (FRG) method. Very interesting to the scientific community is the order of the chiral phase transition and the critical temperature at which it takes place in effective models for QCD. The upcoming CBM experiment at GSI Darmstadt will allow to test the performance of these approaches in the near future.

Our talk is concerned with the question of which order the chiral phase transition of two-flavor QCD is. We briefly summarize the predictions as inferred from the linear sigma model and discuss our FRG results taking into account the influence of instantons which give rise to the axial anomaly.