Strong-Interaction Matter under Extreme Conditions from Chiral Quark Models with Nonlocal Separable Interactions

We review the current status of the research on effective nonlocal NJL-like chiral quark models with separable interactions, focusing on the application of this approach to the description of the properties of hadronic and quark matter under extreme conditions. The analysis includes the predictions for various hadron properties in vacuum, as well as the study of the features of deconfinement and chiral restoration phase transitions for systems at finite temperature and/or density. We also address other related subjects, such as the study of phase transitions for imaginary chemical potentials, the possible existence of inhomogeneous phase regions, the presence of color superconductivity, the effects produced by strong external magnetic fields and the application to the description of compact stellar objects.

Strong magnetic fields in a nonlocal Polyakov chiral quark model

We study the behavior of strongly interacting matter under an external constant magnetic field in the context of nonlocal chiral quark models that incorporate a coupling to the Polyakov loop. We find that at zero temperature the behavior of the quark condensates shows the expected magnetic catalysis effect, our predictions being in good quantitative agreement with lattice QCD results. On the other hand when the analysis is extended to the case of finite temperature our results show that nonlocal models naturally lead to the Inverse Magnetic Catalysis effect for both the chiral restoration and deconfinement transition temperatures.