QCD at high Baryon Density and Temperature: Competing Condensates and the Tricritical Point

The phase diagram of strongly interacting matter is explored as a function of temperature and baryon number density. We investigate the possible simultaneous formation of condensates in the conventional quark–anti-quark channel (breaking chiral symmetry) and in a quark–quark channel leading to color superconductivity: the spontaneous breaking of color symmetry via the formation of quark Cooper pairs. We point out that for two massless quark flavors a tricritical point in the phase diagram separates a chiral symmetry restoring first order transition at high densities from the second order transition at high temperatures. Away from the chiral limit this tricritical point becomes a second order phase transition with Ising model exponents, suggesting that a long correlation length may develop in heavy ion collisions in which the phase transition is traversed at the appropriate density.