Deconfinement at finite chemical potential

Abstract

In a confining, renormalisable, Dyson-Schwinger equation model of two-flavour QCD we explore the chemical-potential dependence of the dressed-quark propagator, which provides a means of determining the behaviour of the chiral and deconfinement order parameters, and low-energy pion observables. We find coincident, first order deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration transitions at μc = 375 MeV.fπ is insensitive to μ until μ ≈ μ0: = 0.7 μc when it begins to increase rapidly. mπ is weakly dependent on μ, decreasing slowly with μ and reaching a minimum 6% less than its μ = 0 value at μ = μ0. In a two-flavour free-quark gas at μ = μc the baryon number density would be approximately 3 ρ0, where ρ0 = 0.16 fm-3; while in such a gas at μ0 the density is ρ0. © 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.