Testing imaginary vs. real chemical potential in finite-temperature QCD

One suggestion for determining the properties of QCD at finite temperatures and densities is to carry out lattice simulations with an imaginary chemical potential whereby no sign problem arises, and to convert the results to real physical observables only afterwards. We test the practical feasibility of such an approach for a particular class of physical observables, spatial correlation lengths in the quark-gluon plasma phase. Simulations with imaginary chemical potential followed by analytic continuation are compared with simulations with real chemical potential. which are possible by using a dimensionally reduced effective action For hot QCD (in practice we consider QCD with two massless quark flavours). We find that for imaginary chemical potential the system undergoes a phase transition at \ mu /T \ approximate to pi /3, and thus observables are analytic only in a limited range. However, utilising this range, relevant information can be obtained for the real chemical potential case. (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.