Instanton-induced crossover in dense QCD

Understand

We study the properties of an instanton ensemble in three-flavor dense QCD which can be regarded as an instanton plasma weakly interacting by exchanging the eta' mesons.

• Based on this description, we explore the chiral phase transition induced by the instanton ensemble at high baryon density in analogy with the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition.
• Using the renormalization group approach, we show that the instanton ensemble always behaves as a screened and unpaired plasma.
• We also demonstrate that the chiral condensate in dense QCD is proportional to the instanton density.