Chiral thermodynamics and fluctuations in the nuclear sector of the QCD phase diagram

In order to study simultaneously the thermodynamics of nuclear matter and the question of chiral restoration, a chiral nucleon-meson model is analyzed. To describe successfully the dynamics, in particular close to the critical point of the liquid-gas phase transition, fluctuations are included within the framework of the functional renormalization group. The calculations for nuclear matter agree nicely with results obtained from in-medium chiral effective field theory. Moreover, for temperatures below 100 MeV and densities below twice the nuclear saturation density, no signs of a chiral phase transition are found.