Phase structure of three and four flavor QCD

Understand

We investigate the phase structure of QCD at finite temperature and light-quark chemical potential.

• We improve upon earlier results for N_f=2+1 dynamical quark flavors and investigate the effects of charm quarks in an extension to N_f=2+1+1.
• We determine the quark condensate and the Polyakov loop potential using solutions of a coupled set of (truncated) Dyson-Schwinger equations for the quark and gluon propagators of Landau gauge QCD.
• At zero chemical potential we find excellent agreement with results from lattice-QCD.