Phase diagram of QCD in a magnetic field: A review

Understand

We review in detail recent advances in our understanding of the phase structure and the phase transitions of hadronic matter in strong magnetic fields $B$ and zero quark chemical potentials $\mu_f$.

• Many aspects of QCD are described using low-energy effective theories and models such as the MIT bag model, the hadron resonance gas model, chiral perturbation theory, the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model, the quark-meson (QM) model and Polyakov-loop extended versions of the NJL and QM models.
• We critically examine their properties and applications.
• This includes mean-field calculations as well as approaches beyond the mean-field approximation such as the functional renormalization group (FRG).