Chiral phase structure and critical end point in QCD

Abstract: We map out the QCD phase structure at finite temperature and chemical potential for 2-flavour and 2 + 1-flavour QCD. This is done within a generalised functional approach to QCD put forward in arXiv:2002.07500 [hep-ph]. Specifically we compute the quark propagator and the finite-temperature and density fluctuations of the gluon propagator and the quark-gluon vertex on the basis of precision data for vacuum correlation functions. The novel ingredient is the direct self-consistent computation of the DSEs for the dressings of the quark-gluon vertex, in contrast to the common use of STI-inspired vertices. For small densities the results for the chiral order parameter agree with the respective lattice and functional renormalisation group results, for large densities the present results are in a quantitative agreement with the latter, including the location of the critical end point.