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 μ_c = 375 MeV. f_πis insensitive to μuntil μ\approx μ_0 = 0.7 mu_c when it begins to increase rapidly. m_πis weakly dependent on μ, decreasing slowly with μand reaching a minimum 6% less than its μ=0 value at μ=μ_0. In a two-flavour free-quark gas at μ=μ_c the baryon number density would be approximately 3 ρ_0, where ρ_0=0.16 fm^{-3}; while in such a gas at μ_0 the density is ρ_0.

11 pages, 3 figures, epsfig.sty, elsart.sty