Developing Transport Theory to Study the Chiral Phase Transition

Zusammenfassung

One of the fundamental questions that is open to both theory and experiment is how to observe the chiral phase transition. Indications that a phase transition from a chirally symmetric to a chirally broken phase have been obtained a long time ago: lattice gauge simulations of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which are equilibrium calculations that can include only temperature but not finite density, show a phase transition at a finite critical temperature T _c [1]. Unfortunately, due to the difficulties inherent in a confining theory such as QCD, it is impossible to observe this transition directly experimentally, let alone obtain experimental values for the usual quantities that are associated with critical phenomena, such as critical exponents.