Lattice simulations of the QCD chiral transition at real baryon density

Understand

State-of-the-art lattice QCD studies of hot and dense strongly interacting matter currently rely on extrapolation from zero or imaginary chemical potentials.

• The ill-posedness of numerical analytic continuation puts severe limitations on the reliability of such methods.
• Here we use the more direct sign reweighting method to perform lattice QCD simulation of the QCD chiral transition at finite real baryon density on phenomenologically relevant lattices.
• This method does not require analytic continuation and avoids the overlap problem associated with generic reweighting schemes, so has only statistical but no uncontrolled systematic uncertainties for a fixed lattice setup.