Chiral transition in a strong magnetic background

Understand

The presence of a strong magnetic background can modify the nature and the dynamics of the chiral phase transition at finite temperature.

• We compute the modified effective potential in the linear sigma model with quarks to one loop in the $\bar{MS}$ scheme for $N_{f}=2$.
• For fields $eB\sim 5 m_{\pi}^{2}$ and larger a crossover is turned into a weak first-order transition.
• We discuss possible implications for non-central heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC, and for the primordial QCD transition.