Microscopic origin of criticality at macroscale in QCD chiral phase transition

¹ Key Laboratory of Quark & Lepton Physics (MOE) and Institute of Particle Physics, Central China Normal University, Wuhan 430079, China
² Physics Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973, USA

^* e-mail: hengtong.ding@ccnu.edu.cn
^** e-mail: huangweiping@mails.ccnu.edu.cn
^*** e-mail: swagato@bnl.gov
^**** e-mail: petreczk@bnl.gov

Published online: 26 June 2024

Abstract

We reveal that the criticality of the chiral phase transition in QCD at the macroscale arises from the microscopic energy levels of its fundamental constituents, the quarks. We establish a novel relation between cumulants of the chiral order parameter (i.e., chiral condensate) and correlations among the energy levels of quarks (i.e., eigenspectra of the massless Dirac operator), which naturally leads to a generalization of the Banks-Casher relation. Based on this novel relation and through (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD calculations using the HISQ action with varying light quark masses in the vicinity of the chiral phase transition, we demonstrate that the correlations among the infrared part of the Dirac eigenspectra exhibit same universal scaling behaviors as expected of the cumulants of the chiral condensate. We find that these universal scaling behaviors extend up to the physical values of the up and down quark masses.