Today was the day of finite temperature and density, on which the general review talk was delivered by Heng-Tong Ding. While in the meantime agreement has been reached on the transition temperature, the nature of the transition (crossover) and the equation of state at the physical quark masses, on which different formulations differed a lot in the past, the Columbia plot of the nature of the transition as a function of the light and strange quark masses still remains to be explored, and there are discrepancies between results obtained in different formulations. On the topic of U(1)A restoration (on which I do have a layman's question: to my understanding U(1)A is broken by the axial anomaly, which to my understanding arises from the path integral measure - so why should one expect the symmetry to be restored at high temperature? The situation is quite different from dynamical spontaneous symmetry breaking, as far as I understand), there is no evidence for restoration so far. A number of groups have taken to using the gradient flow as a tool to perform relatively cheap investigations of the equation of state. There are also new results from the different approaches to finite-density QCD, including cumulants from the Taylor-expansion approach, which can be related to heavy-ion observables, and new ways of stabilizing complex Langevin dynamics.
This was followed by two topical talks. The first, by Seyong Kim, was on the subject of heavy flavours at finite temperature. Heavy flavours are one of the most important probes of the quark-gluon plasma, and J/ψ suppression has served as a diagnostic tool of QGP formation for a long time. To understand the influence of high temperatures on the survival of quarkonium states and on the transport properties of heavy flavours in the QGP, knowledge of the spectral functions is needed. Unfortunately, extracting these from a finite number of points in Euclidean point is an ill-posed problem, especially so when the time extent is small at high temperature. The methods used to get at them nevertheless, such as the maximum entropy method or Bayesian fits, need to use some kind of prior information, introducing the risk of a methodological bias leading to systematic errors that may be not only quantitative, but even qualitative; as an example, MEM shows P-wave bottomonium to melt around the transition temperature, whereas a newer Bayesian method shows it to survive, so clearly more work is needed.
The second topical talk was Kurt Langfeld speaking about the density-of-states method. This method is based on determining a function ρ(E), which is essentially the path integral of δ(S[φ]-E), such that the partition function can be written as the Laplace transform of ρ, which can be generalized to the case of actions with a sign problem, where the partition function can then be written as the Fourier transform of a function P(s). An algorithm to compute such functions exists in the form of what looks like a sort of microcanonical simulation in a window [E-δE;E+δE] and determines the slope of ρ at E, whence ρ can be reconstructed. Ergodicity is ensured by having the different windows overlap and running in parallel, with a possibility of "replica exchange" between the processes running for neighbouring windows when configurations within the overlap between them are generated. The examples shown, e.g. for the Potts model, looked quite impressive in that the method appears able to resolve double-peak structures even when the trough between the peaks is suppressed by many orders of magnitude, such that a Markov process would have no chance of crossing between the two probability peaks.
After the coffee break, Aleksi Kurkela reviewed the phenomenology of heavy ions. The flow properties that were originally taken as a sign of hydrodynamics having set in are now also observed in pp collisions, which seem unlikely to be hydrodynamical. In understanding and interpreting these results, the pre-equilibration evolution is an important source of uncertainty; the current understanding seems to be that the system goes from an overoccupied to an underoccupied state before thermalizing, making different descriptions necessary at different times. At early times, simulations of classical Yang-Mills theory on a lattice in proper-time/rapidity coordinates are used, whereas later a quasiparticle description and kinetic theory can be applied; all this seems to be qualitative so far.
The energy momentum tensor, which plays an important role in thermodynamics and hydrodynamics, was the topic of the last plenary of the day, which was given by Hiroshi Suzuki. Translation invariance is broken on the lattice, so the Ward-Takahashi identity for the energy-momentum tensor picks up an O(a) violation term, which can become O(1) by radiative corrections. As a consequence, three different renormalization factors are needed to renormalize the energy-momentum tensor. One way of getting at these are the shifted boundary conditions of Giusti and Meyer, another is the use of the gradient flow at short flow times, and there are first results from both methods.
The parallel sessions of the afternoon concluded the parallel programme.
