Abstract. We summarise recent progress in simulating QCD at nonzero baryon density using complex Langevin dynamics. After a brief outline of the main idea, we discuss gauge cooling as a means to control the evolution. Subsequently we present a status report for heavy dense QCD and its phase structure, full QCD with staggered quarks, and full QCD with Wilson quarks, both directly and using the hopping parameter expansion to all orders.
Complex Langevin simulations allow numerical studies of theories that exhibit a sign problem, such as QCD, and are thereby potentially suitable to determine the QCD phase diagram from first principles. Here we study QCD in the limit of heavy quarks for a wide range of temperatures and chemical potentials. Our results include an analysis of the adaptive gauge cooling technique, which prevents large excursions into the non-compact directions of the SL(3, C) manifold. We find that such excursions may appear spontaneously and change the statistical distribution of physical observables, which leads to disagreement with known results. Results whose excursions are sufficiently small are used to map the boundary line between confined and deconfined quark phases.
In this review we present the current state-of-the-art on complex Langevin simulations and their implications for the QCD phase diagram. After a short summary of the complex Langevin method, we present and discuss recent developments. Here we focus on the explicit computation of boundary terms, which provide an observable that can be used to check one of the criteria of correctness explicitly. We also present the method of Dynamic Stabilization and elaborate on recent results for fully dynamical QCD.
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