Polyakov loop fluctuations and deconfinement in the limit of heavy quarks

Abstract

We explore the influence of heavy quarks on the deconfinement phase transition in an effective model for gluons interacting with dynamical quarks in color SU(3). With decreasing quark mass, the strength of the explicit breaking of the Z(3) symmetry grows and the first-order transition ends in a critical endpoint. The nature of the critical endpoint is examined by studying the longitudinal and transverse fluctuations of the Polyakov loop, quantified by the corresponding susceptibilities. The longitudinal susceptibility is enhanced in the critical region, while the transverse susceptibility shows a monotonic behavior across the transition point. We investigate the dependence of the critical endpoint on the number of quark flavors at vanishing and finite quark density. Finally we confront the model results with lattice calculations and discuss a possible link between the hopping parameter and the quark mass.

8 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Susceptibilities and the Phase Structure of a Chiral Model with Polyakov Loops
• Direct determination of the strange and light quark condensates from full lattice QCD

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The phase structure of QCD for heavy quarks
• QCD phase transitions in the light quark chiral limit
• Strong coupling methods in QCD thermodynamics
• Building models of quarks and gluons with an arbitrary number of colors using Cartan-Polyakov loops
• Approaching the Continuum Limit of the Deconfinement Critical Point for $N_{\text{f}}=2$ Staggered Fermions