Theory HEP Seminar

Dynamics of the chiral phase transition - Universal fluctuations near criticality

David Mesterhazy

University of Illinois at Chicago

The quantitative understanding of real-time dynamics for systems with strong correlations and interactions poses one of the most diverse and challenging problems in contemporary physics. Applications cover a huge range of scales, from low-temperature condensed matter systems to the extreme states of matter observed, e.g., in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. Nonperturbative functional methods, e.g., the functional renormalization group and nPI effective action techniques, offer a powerful approach to tackle these problems. Here, I focus on applications of these methods to long time relaxational behavior and quench dynamics near criticality. At the critical point the coupling to additional slow modes plays an important role and essentially determines the relevant dynamic universality class and associated scaling behavior. I will consider models A, C, and H in the Halperin-Hohenberg classification of critical dynamics and discuss their applicability to the relativistic dynamics of the chiral order parameter in models of strongly-interacting matter close to the critical point.