Quark masses in two-flavor QCD

Abstract

Considered as a function of the quark mases, two-flavor QCD depends on three parameters, including one that is CP violating. As the masses vary to unphysical values, regions of both first- and second-order phase transitions are expected. For non-degenerate quarks, non-perturbative effects leave individual quark mass ratios with a renormalization scheme dependence. This complicates matching lattice results with perturbative schemes and clarifies the tautology with attacking the strong CP problem via a vanishing up quark mass.