Poster presented by Mark Alford
Poster Session
Topic: Finite Temperature and Density
High-density QCD: the effects of strangeness
Abstract: I describe the results of recent investigations into the expected phase structure of 2+1 flavor QCD at high quark density, as a function of chemical potential $\mu$ and the strange quark mass $m_s$. The main features are: (1) Chiral symmetry is always {\it broken} at sufficiently high $\mu$, by color-flavor locking. (2) If $m_s$ is small enough, chiral symmetry breaking is present for all densities down to those characteristic of baryonic matter, so quark matter and baryonic matter may be continuously connected. In this case, I show how quark and baryonic physics match smoothly onto each other.
Massimo Campostrini,
campo@mailbox.difi.unipi.it