Distribution of canonical determinants in QCD

The distribution of canonical determinants in QCD is determined by means of chiral perturbation theory. For a nonzero quark charge the canonical determinants take complex values. In the dilute pion gas approximation, we compute all moments of the magnitude of the canonical determinants, as well as the first nonvanishing moments of the real and imaginary parts. The nontrivial cancellation between the real and the imaginary parts of the canonical determinants is derived and the signal to noise ratio is discussed. The analytical distributions are compared to lattice data. The average density of the magnitude of the canonical determinants is determined as well and is shown to be given by a variant of the log-normal distribution.