Light Roberge-Weiss tricritical endpoint at imaginary isospin and baryon chemical potential

Abstract

Imaginary chemical potentials serve as a useful tool to constrain the QCD phase diagram and to gain insight into the thermodynamics of strongly interacting matter. In this study, we report on the first determination of the phase diagram for arbitrary imaginary baryon and isospin chemical potentials at high temperature using one-loop perturbation theory, revealing a nontrivial structure of Roberge-Weiss (RW) phase transitions in this plane. Subsequently, this system is simulated numerically with Nf=2 unimproved staggered quarks on Nτ=4 lattices at a range of temperatures at one of the RW phase transitions. We establish a lower bound for the light quark mass, where the first-order transition line terminates in a tricritical point. It is found that this tricritical mass is increased as compared to the case of purely baryonic imaginary chemical potentials, indicating that our setup is more advantageous for identifying critical behavior toward the chiral limit. Finally, the dynamics of local Polyakov loop clusters is also studied in conjunction with the RW phase transition. Published by the American Physical Society 2024