Chiral symmetry restoration at finite temperature and chemical potential in the improved ladder approximation

Abstract

The chiral symmetry of QCD is studied at finite temperature and chemical potential using the Schwinger-Dyson equation in the improved ladder approximation. We calculate three order parameters; the vacuum expectation value of the quark bilinear operator, the pion decay constant and the quark mass gap. We have a second order phase transition at the temperature $T_c=169$ MeV along the zero chemical potential line, and a first order phase transition at the chemical potential $\mu_c=598$ MeV along the zero temperature line. We also calculate the critical exponents of the three order parameters.