Towards a theoretical description of dense QCD

Abstract

The properties of matter at finite baryon densities play an important role for the astrophysics of compact stars as well as for heavy ion collisions or the description of nuclear matter. Because of the sign problem of the quark determinant, lattice QCD cannot be simulated by standard Monte Carlo at finite baryon densities. I review alternative attempts to treat dense QCD with an effective lattice theory derived by analytic strong coupling and hopping expansions, which close to the continuum is valid for heavy quarks only, but shows all qualitative features of nuclear physics emerging from QCD. In particular, the nuclear liquid gas transition and an equation of state for baryons can be calculated directly from QCD. A second effective theory based on strong coupling methods permits studies of the phase diagram in the chiral limit on coarse lattices.

10 pages, 9 figures; Contribution to the "12th Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum" conference, Thessaloniki, 28.08.-04.09.2016

References in corpus (8)

• The lattice QCD phase diagram in and away from the strong coupling limit
• Onset Transition to Cold Nuclear Matter from Lattice QCD with Heavy Quarks
• The phase structure of QCD for heavy quarks
• The QCD phase diagram in the limit of heavy quarks using complex Langevin dynamics
• Heavy dense QCD and nuclear matter from an effective lattice theory
• Inverse Monte-Carlo determination of effective lattice models for SU(3) Yang-Mills theory at finite temperature
• Anatomy of the sign-problem in heavy-dense QCD
• Polyakov loop fluctuations and deconfinement in the limit of heavy quarks

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Review on novel methods for lattice gauge theories
• Polyakov loop fluctuations in the presence of external fields