Open Access

Owe Philipsen

• The so-called sign problem of lattice QCD prohibits Monte Carlo simulations at finite baryon density by means of importance sampling. Over the last few years, methods have been developed which are able to circumvent this problem as long as the quark chemical potential is m=T <~1. After a brief review of these methods, their application to a first principles determination of the QCD phase diagram for small baryon densities is summarised. The location and curvature of the pseudo-critical line of the quark hardon transition is under control and extrapolations to physical quark masses and the continuum are feasible in the near future. No definite conclusions can as yet be drawn regarding the existence of a critical end point, which turns out to be extremely quark mass and cut-off sensitive. Investigations with different methods on coarse lattices show the lightmass chiral phase transition to weaken when a chemical potential is switched on. If persisting on finer lattices, this would imply that there is no chiral critical point or phase transition for physical QCD. Any critical structure would then be related to physics other than chiral symmetry breaking.