Title: Does hot QCD have a conformal manifold in the chiral limit?
Date: Jul 21, 2026
Time: 10:00 - 11:00
Speaker: Prof. Aleksey Cherman
Affiliation: Univ. of Minnesota
Abstract: Recent lattice evidence may suggest the chiral phase transition in QCD is second-order for $N_f \ge 2$ massless flavors. I'll present constraints on CFT descriptions of a critical line in temperature $T$ and imaginary baryon chemical potential $\theta_B = i\mu_B/T$. An 't~Hooft anomaly at general $\theta_B$ constrains the transition even at $\theta_B = 0$, leaving only three minimal scenarios. The best-motivated scenario for $N_f\ge3$, and perhaps also $N_f = 2$, is beyond Ginzburg-Landau, featuring a conformal manifold of $\theta_B$-dependent universality classes with an exactly marginal operator related to baryon density. The talk is based on recent work with Shi Chen and Rob Pisarski, https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09977