Magnetic susceptibility of a strongly interacting thermal medium with 2+1 quark flavors

Understand

Thermodynamics of the three-flavor quark-meson model with axial anomaly is studied in the presence of external magnetic fields.

• The nonperturbative functional renormalization group is employed in order to incorporate quantum and thermal fluctuations beyond the mean-field approximation.
• We calculate the magnetic susceptibility with proper renormalization and find that the system is diamagnetic in the hadron phase and paramagnetic in the hot plasma phase.
• The obtained values of the magnetic susceptibility are in reasonable agreement with the data from first-principle lattice QCD.