Is the 2-Flavor Chiral Transition of First Order?

Abstract

We study the effects of the interaction between the Chiral condensate and the Polyakov loop on the chiral transition within an effective Lagrangian. We find that the effects of the interaction change the order of the phase transition when the explicit breaking of the Z_N symmetry of the Polyakov loop is large. Our results suggest that the chiral transition in 2-flavor QCD may be first order.

8 pages with 4 figures

References in corpus (5)

• The order of the quantum chromodynamics transition predicted by the standard model of particle physics
• The QCD transition temperature: results with physical masses in the continuum limit
• New Critical Point Induced by the Axial Anomaly in Dense QCD
• Two flavor QCD and Confinement
• Evidence for O(2) universality at the finite temperature transition for lattice QCD with 2 flavours of massless staggered quarks