The lattice QCD phase diagram in and away from the strong coupling limit

Abstract

We study lattice QCD with four flavors of staggered quarks. In the limit of infinite gauge coupling, "dual" variables can be introduced, which render the finite-density sign problem mild and allow a full determination of the $\mu -T$ phase diagram by Monte Carlo simulations, also in the chiral limit. However, the continuum limit coincides with the weak coupling limit. We propose a strong-coupling expansion approach towards the continuum limit. We show first results, including the phase diagram and its chiral critical point, from this expansion truncated to next-to-leading order.

Comments: 5 pages, 7 figures; submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett