Towards the chiral critical surface of QCD

Abstract

The critical endpoint of the QCD phase diagram is usually expected to belong to the chiral critical surface, i.e. the surface of second order transitions bounding the region of first order chiral phase transitions for small quark masses in the {m_{u,d}, m_s,\mu} parameter space. For \mu=0, QCD with physical quark masses is known to be an analytic crossover, requiring the region of chiral transitions to expand with \mu for a critical endpoint to exist. Instead, on coarse N_t=4 lattices, we find the area of chiral transitions to shrink with \mu, which excludes a chiral critical point for QCD at moderate chemical potentials \mu_B < 500 MeV. First results on finer N_t=6 lattices indicate a curvature of the critical surface consistent with zero and unchanged conclusions.