Singularities of QCD in the complex chemical potential plane

Understand

We study the thermodynamic singularities of QCD in the complex chemical potential plane by a numerical simulation of lattice QCD, and discuss a method to understand the nature of the QCD phase transition at finite density from the information of the singularities.

• The existence of singular points at which the partition function (Z) vanishes is expected in the complex plane.
• These are called Lee-Yang zeros or Fisher zeros.
• We investigate the distribution of these singular points using the data obtained by a simulation of two-flavor QCD with p4-improved staggered quarks.