Critical surface in hot and dense QCD with the vector interaction

Abstract

We discuss the chiral phase transition of hot and dense quark matter. We illustrate that the first-order phase transition is generally favored at high baryon density and the repulsive vector-vector interaction weakens the first-order phase transition. We use the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model with the Polyakov loop coupling for concreteness. We locate the QCD critical surface on the quark mass plane for various values of the vector coupling constant. We find that, with increasing quark chemical potential, the first-order region in the quark mass plane could shrink for sufficiently large vector coupling. This may be a possible explanation for the recent lattice QCD results by de Forcrand and Philipsen.

Comments: 6 pages, 7 figures; one figure added for a quantitative comparison, emphasis slightly shifted in Summary