Abstract
We study the behavior of strongly interacting matter under an external constant magnetic field in the context of nonlocal chiral quark models that incorporate a coupling to the Polyakov loop. We find that at zero temperature the behavior of the quark condensates shows the expected magnetic catalysis effect, our predictions being in good quantitative agreement with lattice QCD results. On the other hand when the analysis is extended to the case of finite temperature our results show that nonlocal models naturally lead to the Inverse Magnetic Catalysis effect for both the chiral restoration and deconfinement transition temperatures.
Highlights
The study of the behavior of strongly interacting matter under intense external magnetic fields has gained increasing interest in the last few years. This topic has important applications e.g. in the description of compact objects like magnetars [1], the analysis of heavy ion collisions at very high energies [2] and the exploration of phases at the early Universe [3]. Since these studies require to deal with quantum chromodynamics (QCD) in nonperturbative regimes, present theoretical analyses are based either in the predictions of effective models or in the results obtained through lattice QCD (LQCD) calculations
At zero temperature and chemical potential, both the results of low-energy effective models of QCD and LQCD calculations indicate that the chiral quark condensates should behave as increasing functions of B, which is usually known as “magnetic catalysis”
Close to the chiral restoration temperature, LQCD calculations carried out with realistic quark masses [7, 8] show that light quark-antiquark condensates behave as nonmonotonic functions of the external magnetic field, and this leads to a decrease of the transition temperature when the magnetic field is increased
Summary
The study of the behavior of strongly interacting matter under intense external magnetic fields has gained increasing interest in the last few years. Close to the chiral restoration temperature, LQCD calculations carried out with realistic quark masses [7, 8] show that light quark-antiquark condensates behave as nonmonotonic functions of the external magnetic field, and this leads to a decrease of the transition temperature when the magnetic field is increased This effect is known as “inverse magnetic catalysis” (IMC). Many scenarios have been considered in the last few years to account for the IMC [5], the mechanism behind this effect is not yet fully understood The aim of this contribution is to present the results of some recent analyses [9, 10] of the behavior of strongly interacting matter under a uniform, static magnetic field in the framework of nonlocal chiral quark models.
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