Influence of dynamical screening of four-quarks interaction on the chiral phase diagram

We investigate the effect of screening of the four-quarks contact interactions by the ring diagram at finite temperature and density in an effective chiral model inspired by QCD in the Coulomb gauge. As a consequence, a medium-dependent coupling naturally emerges which, in a class of chiral models, brings the chiral crossover temperature down to the value calculated in lattice QCD at low net-baryon density. Furthermore, it implies a stronger divergence of the chiral susceptibility at the critical point compared to the mean-field dynamics. At high densities, the screening induces a substantial instability region and its size depends on the regularization schemes. We discuss the properties of an effective potential for a class of models described by momentum-independent gap equations. In particular, we introduce the method to construct an approximate effective potential from the gap equations to determine the location of the first-order phase transition. Published by the American Physical Society 2024