Fluctuations of Goldstone modes and the chiral transition in QCD

Understand

We provide evidence for the influence of thermal fluctuations of Goldstone modes on the chiral condensate at finite temperature.

• We show that at fixed temperature, T<Tc, in the vicinity of the chiral transition temperature this leads to a characteristic dependence of the chiral condensate on the square root of the light quark mass (m_l), which is expected for 3-dimensional models with broken O(N) symmetry.
• As a consequence the chiral susceptibility shows a strong quark mass dependence for all temperatures below Tc and diverges like 1/sqrt(m_l) in the chiral limit.