Phase diagram of QCD in strong background magnetic field

Abstract

We discuss the phase diagram of QCD in the presence of a strong background magnetic field, providing numerical evidence, based on lattice simulations of QCD with $2+1$ flavours and physical quark masses, that the QCD crossover turns into a first order phase transition for large enough magnetic field, with a critical endpoint located between $eB=4$ GeV${}^2$ (where we found an analytic crossover at a pseudo-critical temperature $T_c=(98\pm 3)$ MeV) and $eB=9$ GeV${}^2$ (where the measured critical temperature is $T_c=(63\pm 5)$ MeV).

6 pages, 8 figures; contribution to the proceedings of the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP 2022), July 6-13, 2022, Bologna (Italy)