The Fluctuations of the Quark Number and of the Chiral Condensate

Understand

The distributions of the quark number and chiral condensate over the gauge fields are computed for QCD in Euclidean space at nonzero quark chemical potential.

• As both operators are non-hermitian the distributions are in the complex plane.
• Moreover, because of the sign problem, the distributions are not real and positive.
• The computations are carried out within leading order chiral perturbation theory and give a direct insight into the delicate cancellations that take place in contributions to the total baryon number and the chiral condensate.