- Accepted Paper
Fractal phase structure of QCD under imaginary rotation
Phys. Rev. D - Accepted 5 November, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/h94v-cvyn
Phys. Rev. D - Accepted 5 November, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/h94v-cvyn
We show that in hot QCD rotating at an imaginary angular velocity , the angular velocity selects not only the temperature of the bulk but whether charge conjugation is broken there. For QCD at temperature and imaginary quark chemical potential , with in lowest terms, the bulk far from the rotation axis is in the same thermal equilibrium state as nonrotating QCD at temperature and imaginary quark chemical potential ; this follows from the Euclidean boundary conditions and locality alone, and holds nonperturbatively whenever the equivalent nonrotating system has a finite correlation length. Consequently, even at zero quark chemical potential, the bulk is placed at the Roberge-Weiss (RW) point whenever and are both odd, and is spontaneously broken there for $T>qT_{\rm RW}$, with $T_{\rm RW}$ the RW endpoint temperature. The bulks at and , for example, are both at temperature , yet only the former can break . The set of imaginary angular velocities at which is broken has a fractal structure: raising adds rationals of ever larger denominator. At irrational the bulk corresponds to zero-temperature QCD at any and remains confined.
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