DECONFINEMENT AT FINITE CHEMICAL POTENTIAL

Abstract In a confining, renormalisable, Dyson-Schwinger equation model of two-flavour QCD we explore the chemical-potential dependence of the dressed-quark propagator, which provides a means of determining the behaviour of the chiral and deconfinement order parameters, and low-energy pion observables. We find coincident, first order deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration transitions at μ c =375 MeV. fπ is insensitive to μ until μ≈μ 0 :=0.7 μ c when it begins to increase rapidly. mπ is weakly dependent on μ, decreasing slowly with μ and reaching a minimum 6% less than its μ=0 value at μ=μ0. In a two-flavour free-quark gas at μ=μc the baryon number density would be approximately 3 ρ 0 , where ρ 0 =0.16 fm −3 ; while in such a gas at μ0 the density is ρ0.