QCD Phase Diagram and the Constant Mass Approximation

Dynamical generation of quark masses in the infrared region of QCD plays an important role to understand the peculiar nature of the physics of hadrons. As it is known, the solution of QCD gap equation for the quark mass function is flat for low momentum, but smoothly evolves to the perturbative behavior at high momentum. In this work, we use an effective truncation of QCD gap equation valid up to 1 GeV, and implement it at finite temperature and chemical potential to understand the QCD phase diagram for chiral symmetry breaking-chiral symmetry restoration, and confinement-deconfinement phase transitions from the Schwinger-Dyson equations point of view. Our effective kernel contains a gluon dressing function with two light quark flavors N_f = 2, with current quark mass 0.0035 GeV. An effective coupling, adjusted to reproduce the behavior of the chiral condensate at finite T complements our truncation. We find the critical end point of the phase diagram located at the temperature T^E = 0.1245 GeV and the baryonic chemical potential μ^E_B = 0.211 GeV. (paper)