A New Phase at Finite Quark Density from AdS/CFT

We explore phases of N=2 super Yang-Mills theory at finite quark density by introducing quark chemical potential in a D3-D7 setup. We formulate the thermodynamics of brane embeddings and find that we need to renormalize the finite chemical potential due to the divergence of the thermodynamic potentials and we find that the density versus chemical potential equation of state has rich structure. This yields two distinct first order phase transitions in a small window of quark density. In order words, there is a new first order phase transition in the region of deconfined quarks. In this new phase, the chemical potential is a decreasing function of the density. We suggest that this might be relevant to the difference in sQGP--wQGP phases of QCD.Comment: 4 pages, revte

Zeros of QCD partition function from finite density lattices

Partition function zeros steer the critical behavior of a system. Studying four-flavor lattice QCD at finite temperature and density with the Wilson-clover fermion action and the Iwasaki gauge action using a phase-quenched fermion determinant, we combine statistics from multiple chemical potentials to improve sampling of the configuration space, and aim at unraveling the movement of zeros in finite systems. Preparing for further investigations, we discuss methods and criteria used to sieve through complex parameter space spanned by $(\text{Re}\mu, \text{Im}\mu)$ and $(\text{Re}\mu, \text{Im}\beta)$, and present statistically robust zeros of the partition function.Comment: 7 pages, 1 table, and 8 figures, presented at the 31st International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2013), 29 July - 3 August 2013, Mainz, Germany. Changes include: fix a typo and clarify the caption for Figure 1; clearly state estimating error for the number of independent configuration