Abstract
We investigate the behavior of the pseudocritical temperature of QCD as a function of a static magnetic background field for different values of the pion mass, going up to . The study is performed by lattice QCD simulations, adopting a stout staggered discretization of the theory on lattices with slices in the Euclidean temporal direction; for each value of the pion mass the temperature is changed moving along a line of constant physics. We find that the decrease of as a function of , which is observed for physical quark masses, persists in the whole explored mass range, even if the relative variation of appears to be a decreasing function of , approaching zero in the quenched limit. The location of is based on the renormalized quark condensate and its susceptibility; determinations based on the Polyakov loop lead to compatible results. On the contrary, inverse magnetic catalysis, i.e., the decrease of the quark condensate as a function of in some temperature range around , is not observed when the pion mass is high enough. That supports the idea that inverse magnetic catalysis might be a secondary phenomenon, while the modifications induced by the magnetic background on the gauge field distribution and on the confining properties of the medium could play a primary role in the whole range of pion masses.
8 More- Received 29 August 2018
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.98.054509
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society