Chiral Phase Transition Temperature in (2+1)-Flavor QCD.

H.-T Ding,S.-T Li,H Ohno,F Karsch,Hotqcd Collaboration ,O Kaczmarek,C Schmidt,P Steinbrecher,P Hegde,Swagato Mukherjee,Anirban Lahiri,P Petreczky

doi:10.1103/physrevlett.123.062002

Abstract

We present a lattice-QCD-based determination of the chiral phase transition temperature in QCD with two degenerate, massless quarks and a physical strange quark mass using lattice QCD calculations with the highly improved staggered quarks action. We propose and calculate two novel estimators for the chiral transition temperature for several values of the light quark masses, corresponding to Goldstone pion masses in the range of 58 MeV≲m_{π}≲163 MeV. The chiral phase transition temperature is determined by extrapolating to vanishing pion mass using universal scaling analysis. Finite-volume effects are controlled by extrapolating to the thermodynamic limit using spatial lattice extents in the range of 2.8-4.5times the inverse of the pion mass. Continuum extrapolations are carried out by using three different values of the lattice cutoff, corresponding to lattices with temporal extents N_{τ}=6, 8, and 12. After thermodynamic, continuum, and chiral extrapolations, we find the chiral phase transition temperature T_{c}^{0}=132_{-6}^{+3} MeV.

Highlights

We present a lattice-quantum chromodynamics (QCD)-based determination of the chiral phase transition temperature in QCD with two degenerate, massless quarks and a physical strange quark mass using lattice QCD calculations with the highly improved staggered quarks action
Introduction.—For physical values of the light up, down, and heavier strange quark masses, strongly interacting matter undergoes a transition from a low-temperature hadronic regime to a high-temperature region that is best described by quark and gluon degrees of freedom
This smooth crossover between the two asymptotic regimes is not a phase transition [1]. It is characterized by a pseudocritical temperature, Tpc, that has been determined in several numerical studies of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) [2,3,4]

Summary

Hc c

Hc ≠ 0, we de facto present a determination of the chiral phase transition temperature T0c. T0c appears as a fit parameter in all finitetemperature scaling studies of the chiral transition in QCD [3,12,13], so far no lattice QCD calculation has carried out a systematic analysis of 0 c by controlling thermodynamic, continuum, and chiral limits.

Published by the American Physical Society

Here t ðT

Findings

It is thus advantageous to determine