What is chiral susceptibility probing?

Abstract

In the early days of QCD, the axial $U(1)$ anomaly was considered as a trigger for the breaking of the $SU(2)_L\times SU(2)_R$ symmetry through topological excitations of gluon fields. However, it has been a challenge for lattice QCD to quantify the effect. In this work, we simulate QCD at high temperatures with chiral fermions. The exact chiral symmetry enables us to separate the contribution from the axial $U(1)$ breaking from others among the susceptibilities in the scalar and pseudoscalar channels. Our result in two-flavor QCD indicates that the chiral susceptibility, which is conventionally used as a probe for $SU(2)_L\times SU(2)_R$ breaking, is actually dominated by the axial $U(1)$ breaking at temperatures $T\ge 165$ MeV.