The geometry of thermodynamics and applications to the QCD phase diagram

Lunedi 20 gennaio, alle 16 il aula multimediale, il prof. Marco Ruggieri, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou (China), terra' un seminario.   TItle: The geometry of thermodynamics and applications to the QCD phase diagram. Abstract: We study the thermodynamic geometry of the Quark-Meson model, focusing on the curvature, RR, around the chiral crossover finite temperature and baryon chemical potential. We find a peculiar behavior of RR in the crossover region, in which the sign changes and a local maximum develops; in particular, the height of the peak of RR in the crossover region becomes large in proximity of the critical endpoint and diverges at the critical endpoint. The appearance of a pronounced peak of RR close to the critical endpoint supports the idea that RR grows with the correlation volume around the phase transition. We also analyze the mixed fluctuations of energy and baryon number, ⟨ΔUΔN⟩⟨ΔUΔN⟩, which grow up substantially in proximity of the critical endpoint: in the language of thermodynamic geometry these fluctuations are responsible for the vanishing of the determinant of the metric, which results in thermodynamic instability and are thus related to the appearance of the second order phase transition at the critical endpoint.