Equation of state for physical quark masses

Abstract

We calculate the QCD equation of state for temperatures corresponding to the transition region with physical mass values for two degenerate light quark flavors and a strange quark using an improved staggered fermion action (p4-action) on lattices with temporal extent ${N}_{\ensuremath{\tau}}=8$. We compare our results with previous calculations performed at twice larger values of the light quark masses as well as with results obtained from a resonance gas model calculation. We also discuss the deconfining and chiral aspects of the QCD transition in terms of renormalized Polyakov loop, strangeness fluctuations, and subtracted chiral condensate. We show that compared to the calculations performed at twice larger value of the light quark mass the transition region shifts by about 5 MeV toward smaller temperatures.