Fabian Rennecke

From Quarks and Gluons to Hadrons: Chiral Symmetry Breaking in Dynamical QCD

We present an analysis of the dynamics of two-flavour QCD in the vacuum. Special attention is payed to the transition from the high energy quark-gluon regime to the low energy regime governed by hadron dynamics. This is done within a functional renormalisation group approach to QCD amended by dynamical hadronisation techniques. The latter allow us to describe conveniently the transition from the perturbative high-energy regime to the nonperturbative low-energy limit without suffering from a fine-tuning of model parameters. In the present work, we apply these techniques to two-flavour QCD with physical quark masses and show how the dynamics of the dominant low-energy degrees of freedom emerge from the underlying quark-gluon dynamics.

Higher order quark-mesonic scattering processes and the phase structure of QCD

We study the impact of higher order quark-meson scattering processes on the chiral phase structure of two-flavour QCD at finite temperature and quark density. Thermal, density and quantum fluctuations are included within a functional renormalisation group approach to the quark-meson model. We present results on the chiral phase boundary, the critical endpoint, and the curvature of the phase transition line at vanishing density.

Vacuum structure of vector mesons in QCD

We study the chiral dynamics of vector mesons in two-flavor QCD in vacuum by utilizing a functional renormalization group approach. This allows us to capture the dynamical transition from the quark-gluon phase at high energies to the hadronic phase at low energies without the necessity of model parameter tuning. We use this to analyze the scaling of vector meson masses towards the chiral symmetry breaking scale, the decoupling of the mesons at high energies, and the validity of vector meson dominance.

Baryon number fluctuations at finite temperature and density

We investigate baryon number fluctuations for finite temperature and density in two-flavor QCD. This is done within a QCD-improved low-energy effective theory in an extension of the approach put forward by Fu and Pawlowski [Phys. Rev. D 92, 116006 (2015) and Phys. Rev. D 93, 091501 (2016)]. In the present work, we aim to improve the predictive power of this approach for large temperatures and, in partitular, large densities, that is, for small collision energies. This is achieved by taking into account the full frequency dependence of the quark dispersion. This ensures the necessary Silver Blaze property of finite density QCD for the first time, which so far was only implemented approximately. Moreover, we show that Polyakov-loop fluctuations have a sizeable impact at large temperatures and density. The results for the kurtosis of baryon number fluctuations are compared to previous effective theory results, lattice results, and recent experimental data from STAR.

In-medium spectral functions of vector- and axial-vector mesons from the functional renormalization group

In this work, we present the first results on vector- and axial-vector meson spectral functions as obtained by applying the nonperturbative functional renormalization group approach to an effective low-energy theory motivated by the gauged linear sigma model. By using a recently proposed analytic continuation method, we study the in-medium behavior of the spectral functions of the

Fluctuation-induced modifications of the phase structure in ( 2+1 )-flavor QCD

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QCD-inspired determination of NJL model parameters

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Spectral Functions from the Functional Renormalization Group

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The Phase Diagram of QC2D from Functional Methods

mesons in different regimes of the phase diagram. In particular, we demonstrate explicitly how these spectral functions degenerate at high temperatures as well as at large chemical potentials, as a consequence of the restoration of chiral symmetry. In addition, we also compute the momentum dependence of the

Strangeness Neutrality and QCD Thermodynamics

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