Four-fermion interactions and the chiral symmetry breaking in an external magnetic field

We investigate the chiral symmetry and its spontaneous breaking at finite temperature and in an external magnetic field with four-fermion interactions of different channels. Quantum and thermal fluctuations are included within the functional renormalization group approach, and properties of the set of flow equations for different couplings, such as its fixed points, are discussed. It is found that external parameters, e.g. the temperature and the external magnetic field and so on, do not change the structure of the renormalization group flows for the couplings. The flow strength is found to be significantly dependent on the route and direction in the plane of couplings of different channels. Therefore, the critical temperature for the chiral phase transition shows a pronounced dependence on the direction as well. Given fixed initial ultraviolet couplings, the critical temperature increases with the increasing magnetic field, viz., the magnetic catalysis is observed with initial couplings fixed.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Mesonic excitations and pi--pi scattering lengths at finite temperature in the two-flavor Polyakov--Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model

The mesonic excitations and s-wave pi--pi scattering lengths at finite temperature are studied in the two-flavor Polyakov--Nambu--Jona-Lasinio (PNJL) model. The masses of pi-meson and sigma-meson, pion-decay constant, the pion-quark coupling strength, and the scattering lengths $a_{0}$ and $a_{2}$ at finite temperature are calculated in the PNJL model with two forms of Polyakov-loop effective potential. The obtained results are almost independent of the choice of the effective potentials. The calculated results in the PNJL model are also compared with those in the conventional Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model and indicate that the effect of color confinement screens the effect of temperature below the critical one in the PNJL model. Furthermore, the Goldberger-Treiman relation and the Gell-Mann--Oakes--Renner relation are extended to the case at finite temperature in the PNJL model.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figure

Fluctuations and Correlations of Conserved Charges in QCD at Finite Temperature with Effective Models

We study fluctuations of conserved charges including baryon number, electric charge, and strangeness as well as the correlations among these conserved charges in the 2+1 flavor Polyakov--Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model at finite temperature. The calculated results are compared with those obtained from recent lattice calculations performed with an improved staggered fermion action at two values of the lattice cutoff with almost physical up and down quark masses and a physical value for the strange quark mass. We find that our calculated results are well consistent with those obtained in lattice calculations except for some quantitative differences for fluctuations related with strange quarks. Our calculations indicate that there is a pronounced cusp in the ratio of the quartic to quadratic fluctuations of baryon number, i.e. $\chi_{4}^{B}/\chi_{2}^{B}$, at the critical temperature during the phase transition, which confirms that $\chi_{4}^{B}/\chi_{2}^{B}$ is a useful probe of the deconfinement and chiral phase transition.Comment: 24 pages, 11 figures; final version published in Phys. Rev.