QCD phase transition in a strong magnetic background

Abstract

We investigate the properties of the deconfining/chiral restoring transition for two flavor QCD in the presence of a uniform background magnetic field. We adopt standard staggered fermions and a lattice spacing of the order of 0.3 fm. We explore different values of the bare quark mass, corresponding to pion masses in the range 200--480 MeV, and magnetic fields up to $|e|B\ensuremath{\sim}0.75\text{ }\text{ }{\mathrm{GeV}}^{2}$. The deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration temperatures remain compatible with each other and rise very slightly ($<2%$ for our largest magnetic field) as a function of the magnetic field. On the other hand, the transition seems to become sharper as the magnetic field increases.