paper

QCD at high Baryon Density and Temperature: Competing Condensates and the Tricritical Point

arXiv:hep-ph/9807362 · doi:10.1016/S0375-9474(98)00498-9

Abstract

The phase diagram of strongly interacting matter is explored as a function of temperature and baryon number density. We investigate the possible simultaneous formation of condensates in the conventional quark--anti-quark channel (breaking chiral symmetry) and in a quark--quark channel leading to color superconductivity: the spontaneous breaking of color symmetry via the formation of quark Cooper pairs. We point out that for two massless quark flavors a tricritical point in the phase diagram separates a chiral symmetry restoring first order transition at high densities from the second order transition at high temperatures. Away from the chiral limit this tricritical point becomes a second order phase transition with Ising model exponents, suggesting that a long correlation length may develop in heavy ion collisions in which the phase transition is traversed at the appropriate density.

Talk given at the Workshop on QCD at Finite Baryon Density: A Complex System with a Complex Action, Bielefeld, Germany, 27-30 Apr 1998; 7 pages; references added

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