Eduardo S. Fraga

Phase diagram of hot QCD in an external magnetic field: Possible splitting of deconfinement and chiral transitions

The structure of the phase diagram for strong interactions becomes richer in the presence of a magnetic background, which enters as a new control parameter for the thermodynamics. Motivated by the relevance of this physical setting for current and future high-energy heavy-ion collision experiments and for the cosmological QCD transitions, we use the linear sigma model coupled to quarks and to Polyakov loops as an effective theory to investigate how the chiral and the deconfining transitions are affected, and present a general picture for the temperature--magnetic field phase diagram. We compute and discuss each contribution to the effective potential for the approximate order parameters, and uncover new phenomena such as the paramagnetically induced breaking of global

Chiral transition in a strong magnetic background

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Deconfinement in the presence of a strong magnetic background: An exercise within the MIT bag model

symmetry, and possible splitting of deconfinement and chiral transitions in a strong magnetic field.

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The presence of a strong magnetic background can modify the nature and the dynamics of the chiral phase transition at finite temperature. We compute the modified effective potential in the linear sigma model with quarks to one loop in the MS scheme for N{sub f}=2. For fields eB{approx}5m{sub {pi}}{sup 2} and larger a crossover is turned into a weak first-order transition. We discuss possible implications for noncentral heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the Large Hadron Collider and for the primordial QCD transition.

N_c

We study the effect of a very strong homogeneous magnetic field B on the thermal deconfinement transition within the simplest phenomenological approach: the MIT bag pressure for the quark- gluon plasma and a gas of pions for the hadronic sector. Even though the model is known to be crude in numerical precision and misses the correct nature of the (crossover) transition, it provides a simple setup for the discussion of some subtleties of vacuum and thermal contributions in each phase, and should provide a reasonable qualitative description of the critical temperature in the presence of B. We find that the critical temperature decreases, saturating for very large fields.

Deconfinement Transition in the Presence of a Magnetic Field

We investigate the effect of a homogeneous magnetic field on the thermal deconfinement transition of QCD in the large Nc limit. First we discuss how the critical temperature decreases due to the inclusion of Nf≪Nc flavors of massless quarks in comparison to the pure glue case. Then we study the equivalent correction in the presence of an external Abelian magnetic field. To leading order in Nf/Nc, the deconfinement critical temperature decreases with the magnetic field if the flavor contribution to the pressure behaves paramagnetically, with a sufficiently large magnetization as to overcome any possible magnetic effects in the string tension. Finally, we discuss the effects from a finite quark mass and its competition with magnetic effects.

Role of quark mass in cold and dense perturbative QCD

We consider the equation of state of QCD at high density and zero temperature in perturbation theory to first order in the coupling constant {alpha}{sub s}. We compute the thermodynamic potential including the effect of a nonvanishing mass for the strange quark and show that corrections are sizable. Renormalization group running of the coupling and the strange quark mass plays a crucial role. The structure of quark stars is dramatically modified.

Nucleation of quark matter in protoneutron star matter

The phase transition from hadronic to quark matter may take place already during the early post-bounce stage of core collapse supernovae when matter is still hot and lepton rich. If the phase transition is of first order and exhibits a barrier, the formation of the new phase occurs via the nucleation of droplets. We investigate the thermal nucleation of a quark phase in supernova matter and calculate its rate for a wide range of physical parameters. We show that the formation of the first droplet of a quark phase might be very fast and therefore the phase transition to quark matter could play an important role in the mechanism and dynamics of supernova explosions.

Can a strong magnetic background modify the nature of the chiral transition in QCD

Abstract The presence of a strong magnetic background can modify the nature and the dynamics of the chiral phase transition at finite temperature: for high enough magnetic fields, comparable to the ones expected to be created in noncentral high-energy heavy ion collisions at RHIC and the LHC, the original crossover is turned into a first-order transition. We illustrate this effect within the linear sigma model with quarks to one loop in the MS ¯ scheme for N f = 2 .

Thermal Chiral and Deconfining Transitions in the Presence of a Magnetic Background

We review the influence of a magnetic background on the phase diagram of strong interactions and how the chiral and deconfining transitions can be affected. First we summarize results for both transitions obtained in the framework of the linear sigma model coupled to quarks and to the Polyakov loop, and how they compare to other effective model approaches and to lattice QCD. Then we discuss the outcome of the magnetic MIT bag model that yields a behavior for the critical deconfining temperature which is compatible with recent lattice results and magnetic catalysis. The qualitative success of the magnetic MIT bag model hints to