Polyakov loop potential at finite density

Christian S. Fischer, Leonard Fister, Jan Luecker, Jan M. Pawlowski

Published 2013-06-25Version 1

The Polyakov loop potential serves to distinguish between the confined hadronic and the deconfined quark-gluon plasma phases of QCD. For Nf=2+1 quark flavors with physical masses we determine the Polyakov loop potential at finite temperature and density and extract the location of the deconfinement transition. We find a cross-over at small values of the chemical potential running into a critical end-point at mu/T > 1.