Canonical ensembles and nonzero density quantum chromodynamics

Abstract

We study QCD with nonzero chemical potential on 4 4 lattices by averaging over the canonical partition functions, or sectors with fixed quark number. We derive a condensed matrix of size 2×3× L 3 whose eigenvalues can be used to find the canonical partition functions. We also experiment with a weight for configuration generation which respects the Z (3) symmetry which forces the canonical partition function to be zero for quark numbers that are not multiples of three.