Conjecture about the 2-Flavour QCD Phase Diagram

Abstract

The QCD phase diagram, in particular its sector of high baryon density, is one of the most prominent outstanding mysteries within the Standard Model of particle physics. We sketch a project how to arrive at a conjecture for the case of two massless quark flavours. The pattern of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking is isomorphic to the spontaneous magnetisation in an O(4) non-linear σ-model, which can be employed as a low-energy effective theory to study the critical behaviour. We focus on the 3d O(4) model, where the configurations are divided into topological sectors, as in QCD. A topological winding with minimal Euclidean action is denoted as a skyrmion, and the topological charge corresponds to the QCD baryon number. This effective model can be simulated on a lattice with a powerful cluster algorithm, which should allow us to identify the features of the critical temperature, as we proceed from low to high baryon density. In this sense, this projected numerical study has the potential to provide us with a conjecture about the phase diagram of QCD with two massless quark flavours.