Finite density QCD with a canonical approach

Abstract

We present a canonical method where the properties of QCD are directly obtained as a function of the baryon density rho, rather than the chemical potential mu. We apply this method to the determination of the phase diagram of four-flavor QCD. For a pion mass m_pi \sim 350 MeV, the first-order transition between the hadronic and the plasma phase gives rise to a co-existence region in the T-rho plane, which we study in detail, including the associated interface tension. We obtain accurate results for systems containing up to 30 baryons and quark chemical potentials mu up to 2 T. Our T-mu phase diagram agrees with the literature when mu/T \lesssim 1. At larger chemical potential, we observe a ``bending down'' of the phase boundary. We compare the free energy in the confined and deconfined phase with predictions from a hadron resonance gas and from a free massless quark gas respectively.