1. Nuclear Theory/RIKEN Seminar

    "Exploring the QCD phase structure with functional methods"

    Presented by Bernd-Jochen Schaefer, University of Giessen

    Friday, April 27, 2018, 2 pm
    Building 510, CFNS Seminar Room 2-38

    Hosted by: Chun Shen

    QCD at finite temperature and moderate densities predicts a phase transition from a chiral symmetry broken hadronic phase to a chirally restored deconfined quark-gluon plasma phase. In this talk I report on recent progress achieved basically with functional renormalization group (FRG) methods to reveal the QCD phase structure. Two and three quark flavor FRG investigations are confronted to results obtained with effective chiral low-energy models. The importance of quantum and thermal fluctuations is demonstrated and their consequences for the experimental signatures to detect possible critical endpoints in the phase diagram are discussed.