Speaker
Description
Various physical phenomena arise in QCD in the presence of strong magnetic fields. Some of them, such as magnetic catalysis and inverse magnetic catalysis, have already been well studied on the lattice, in QCD-like models, effective field theories, etc. Moreover, it has been proposed that an analog of the Kondo effect, which emerges in dense QCD, may also be present in magnetized QCD at zero density. This phenomenon is sometimes dubbed the Magnetically Induced Kondo Effect (MIKE). In this work, we study the properties of this effect in the 3-flavor Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (PNJL) model, as a toy model for QCD at finite temperature, with two mass-degenerate light quarks and one heavy quark. In particular, we search for the region in the phase diagram where this effect occurs. Our primary observable is the Kondo condensate, a flavor-non-singlet fermion bilinear involving a mixture of light- and heavy-quark fields. We investigate the temperature and magnetic-field dependence of the Kondo condensate and compare this quantity with the familiar chiral condensate. Finally, we discuss possible avenues to compute the Kondo condensate in lattice QCD.