QCD at high temperature and density: selected highlights

I review some of the recent progress in QCD at high temperature and density, with a focus on the nature of the high-temperature transition; cold and dense matter; and hadron properties and transport coefficients at high temperature.

Effect of magnetic screening mass on the diffusion of heavy quarks

The drag and diffusion coefficients of heavy quarks propagating through quark–gluon plasma (QGP) have been estimated by shielding the infra-red divergences using electric and magnetic screening masses. The electric-type screening in perturbative quantum chromodynamics (pQCD) has been widely studied and used in evaluating the diffusion coefficient of heavy quarks (HQs). The impact of magnetic screening on diffusion coefficients of HQs is not studied before to the best of our knowledge. We explore the effect of magnetic screening mass on the drag and diffusion coefficients of HQs and found it to be non-negligible. Therefore, the effect of magnetic screening should be taken into consideration to characterize hot and dense matter formed in the collisions of nuclei at ultra-relativistic energies. We estimate the suppression of heavy flavored mesons in heavy ion collisions compared to proton+proton collisions at high transverse momenta and found that the suppression is less with the inclusion of magnetic screening. The value of the magnetic screening mass is not known exactly because of its nonperturbative nature. Moreover, it may not be possible to single out the effect of magnetic mass because of the uncertainties in other parameters involved in the diffusion process of HQs. Still it is important to include the effects of magnetic screening because of its physical origin in QCD.

Detecting scale anomaly in chiral phase transition of QCD: new critical endpoint pinned down

Violation of scale symmetry, scale anomaly, being a radical concept in quantum field theory, is of importance to comprehend the vacuum structure of QCD, and should potentially contribute to the chiral phase transition in thermal QCD, as well as the chiral and U(1) axial symmetry. Though it should be essential, direct evidence of scale anomalies has never been observed in the chiral phase transition. We propose a methodology to detect a scale anomaly in the chiral phase transition, which is an electromagnetically induced scale anomaly: apply a weak magnetic field background onto two-flavor massless QCD with an extremely heavy strange quark, first observe the chiral crossover; second, adjusting the strange quark mass to be smaller and smaller, observe the second-order chiral phase transition, and then the first-order one in the massless-three flavor limit. Thus, the second-order chiral phase transition, observed as the evidence of the quantum scale anomaly, is a new critical endpoint. It turns out that this electromagnetic scale anomaly gets most operative in the weak magnetic field regime, rather than a strong field region. We also briefly address accessibility of lattice QCD, a prospected application to dense matter system, and implications to astrophysical observations, such as gravitational wave productions provided from thermomagnetic QCD-like theories.

The Effect of Charge, Isospin, and Strangeness in the QCD Phase Diagram Critical End Point

In this work, we discuss the deconfinement phase transition to quark matter in hot/dense matter. We examine the effect that different charge fractions, isospin fractions, net strangeness, and chemical equilibrium with respect to leptons have on the position of the coexistence line between different phases. In particular, we investigate how different sets of conditions that describe matter in neutron stars and their mergers, or matter created in heavy-ion collisions affect the position of the critical end point, namely where the first-order phase transition becomes a crossover. We also present an introduction to the topic of critical points, including a review of recent advances concerning QCD critical points.