Open Access

Owe Philipsen

• The chiral critical surface is a surface of second order phase transitions bounding the region of first order chiral phase transitions for small quark masses in the fmu;d;ms;mg parameter space. The potential critical endpoint of the QCD (T;m)-phase diagram is widely expected to be part of this surface. Since for m = 0 with physical quark masses QCD is known to exhibit an analytic crossover, this expectation requires the region of chiral transitions to expand with m for a chiral critical endpoint to exist. Instead, on coarse Nt = 4 lattices, we find the area of chiral transitions to shrink with m, which excludes a chiral critical point for QCD at moderate chemical potentials mB < 500 MeV. First results on finer Nt = 6 lattices indicate a curvature of the critical surface consistent with zero and unchanged conclusions. We also comment on the interplay of phase diagrams between the Nf = 2 and Nf = 2+1 theories and its consequences for physical QCD.