Accessibility of color superconducting quark matter phases in heavy-ion collisions

We discuss a hybrid equation of state (EoS) that fulfills constraints for mass-radius relationships and cooling of compact stars. The quark matter EoS is obtained from a Polyakov-loop Nambu--Jona-Lasinio (PNJL) model with color superconductivity, and the hadronic one from a relativistic mean-field (RMF) model with density-dependent couplings (DD-RMF). For the construction of the phase transition regions we employ here for simplicity a Maxwell construction. We present the phase diagram for symmetric matter which exhibits two remarkable features: (1) a "nose"-like structure of the hadronic-to-quark matter phase border with an increase of the critical density at temperatures below T ~ 150 MeV and (2) a high critical temperature for the border of the two-flavor color superconducting (2SC) phase, T_c > 160 MeV. We show the trajectories of heavy-ion collisions in the plane of excitation energy vs. baryon density calculated using the UrQMD code and conjecture that for incident energies of 4 ... 8 A GeV as provided, e.g., by the Nuclotron-M at JINR Dubna or by lowest energies at the future heavy-ion collision experiments CBM@FAIR and NICA@JINR, the color superconducting quark matter phase becomes accessible.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, Poster presented at the XXVI. Max Born Symposium "Three Days of Strong Interactions", Wroclaw (Poland), July 9-11, 200

Strange and charm quark-pair production in strong non-Abelian field

We have investigated strange and charm quark-pair production in the early stage of heavy ion collisions. Our kinetic model is based on a Wigner function method for fermion-pair production in strong non-Abelian fields. To describe the overlap of two colliding heavy ions we have applied the time-dependent color field with a pulse-like shape. The calculations have been performed in an SU(2)-color model with finite current quark masses. For strange quark-pair production the obtained results are close to the Schwinger limit, as we expected. For charm quark the large inverse temporal width of the field pulse, instead of the large charm quark mass, determines the efficiency of the quark-pair production. Thus we do not observe the expected suppression of charm quark-pair production connecting to the usual Schwinger-formalism, but our calculation results in a relatively large charm quark yield. This effect appears in Abelian models as well, demonstrating that particle-pair production for fast varying non-Abelian gluon field strongly deviates from the Schwinger limit for charm quark. We display our results on number densities for light, strange, charm quark-pairs, and different suppression factors as the function of characteristic time of acting chromo-electric field.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures; to appear in the proceedings of the International Conference on Strangeness in Quark matter (SQM2008), Beijing, China, Oct 6-10, 2008; version accepted to J. Phys.

Coupled fermion and boson production in a strong background mean-field

We derive quantum kinetic equations for fermion and boson production starting from a phi^4 Lagrangian with minimal coupling to fermions. Decomposing the scalar field into a mean-field part and fluctuations we obtain spontaneous pair creation driven by a self-interacting strong background field. The produced fermion and boson pairs are self-consistently coupled. Consequently back reactions arise from fermion and boson currents determining the time dependent self-interacting background mean-field. We explore the numerical solution in flux tube geometry for the time evolution of the mean-field as well as for the number- and energy densities for fermions and bosons. We find that after a characteristic time all energy is converted from the background mean-field to particle creation. Applying this general approach to the production of ``quarks'' and ``gluons'' a typical time scale for the collapse of the flux tube is 1.5 fm/c.Comment: 9 pages, latex, epsfig, 7 figure

Two-flavor QCD at finite temperature and chemical potential in a functional approach

We summarize recent results obtained in the Dyson-Schwinger formalism to study the chiral and deconfinement phase transitions of quenched and unquenched QCD at finite temperature and chemical potential. In the quenched case we compare SU(2) and SU(3) gauge theories by taking lattice data for the gluon as an input for the quark Dyson-Schwinger equation. As compared to previous investigations we find a clearer distinction between the second order transition of the two-color theory and the (weak) first order transition of the three-color gauge theory. We then extend this study to unquenched QCD at finite chemical potential by taking matter effects to the gluon into account and investigate the order of the chiral phase transition and the behavior of the deconfinement transition. What we find are coinciding phase transitions up to a critical endpoint which is located at large chemical potential.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, contribution to the proceedings of the International School of Nuclear Physics, Erice 201

Phase diagram in an external magnetic field beyond a mean-field approximation

The phase structure of the Polyakov loop-extended chiral quark-meson model is explored in a nonperturbative approach, beyond a mean-field approximation, in the presence of a magnetic field. We show that by including meson fluctuations one cannot resolve the qualitative discrepancy on the dependence of the crossover transition temperature in a non-zero magnetic field between effective model predictions and recent lattice results (arXiv:1111.4956).We compute the curvature of the crossover line in the T - {\mu}_B plane at a non-zero magnetic field and show that the curvature increases with increasing magnetic field. On the basis of QCD inequalities, we also argue that, at least in the large Nc limit, a chiral critical end point and, consequently, a change from crossover to a first-order chiral phase transition are excluded at zero baryon chemical potential and non-zero magnetic field.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Critical endpoint for deconfinement in matrix and other effective models

We consider the position of the deconfining critical endpoint, where the first order transition for deconfinement is washed out by the presence of massive, dynamical quarks. We use an effective matrix model, employed previously to analyze the transition in the pure glue theory. If the param- eters of the pure glue theory are unaffected by the presence of dynamical quarks, and if the quarks only contribute perturbatively, then for three colors and three degenerate quark flavors this quark mass is very heavy, m_de \sim 2.5 GeV, while the critical temperature, T_de, barely changes, \sim 1% below that in the pure glue theory. The location of the deconfining critical endpoint is a sensitive test to differentiate between effective models. For example, models with a logarithmic potential for the Polyakov loop give much smaller values of the quark mass, m_de \sim 1 GeV, and a large shift in T_de \sim 10% lower than that in the pure glue theory.Comment: 16 pages; 3 figure