Speaker
Aleksey Cherman
(University of Minnesota)
Description
QCD with massless quarks has a temperature-driven chiral phase transition. Contrary to historical analytic and numerical expectations, recent lattice simulations find no evidence for a first-order chiral transition for any number of massless flavors N_f studied. It is therefore natural to ask whether the transition might be second order for all N_f. I will explain the constraints on this possibility that follow from the anomaly structure of QCD. Combined with other known properties of QCD, these constraints suggest that if the chiral transition is second order for all N_f, then the transition is described by an exotic interacting 3d CFT with a conformal manifold.