Localized rainbows in the QCD phase diagram

Understand

We study the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter with light quarks using a recently proposed, small parameter approach to infrared QCD in the Landau gauge.

• This is based on an expansion with respect to both the inverse number of colors and the pure Yang-Mills coupling in the presence of a Curci-Ferrari mass term.
• At leading order, this leads to the well-known rainbow equation for the quark propagator with a massive gluon propagator.
• We solve the latter at nonzero temperature and chemical potential using a simple semi-analytic approximation known to capture the essence of chiral symmetry breaking in the vacuum.