Exploring the nature of chiral phase transition in two-flavor QCD using extra heavy quarks

Abstract

Chiral phase transition of two-flavor QCD at finite quark masses is known to be a crossover except near the chiral limit, but it can turn to a first order transition when adding many extra flavors. This property is used to explore the nature of the phase transition of massless two-flavor QCD using lattice numerical simulations. The extra heavy flavors being incorporated in the form of the hopping parameter expansion through the reweighting, the number of the extra flavors and their masses appear only in a single parameter, defined by $h$. We determine the critical value of $h$, at which the first order and the crossover regions are separated, and examine its dependence on the two-flavor mass. The lattice calculations are carried out at ${N}_{t}=4$, and show that the critical value of $h$ does not depend on the two-flavor mass in the range we have studied ($0.46\ensuremath{\le}{m}_{\ensuremath{\pi}}/{m}_{\ensuremath{\rho}}\ensuremath{\le}0.66$) and appears to remain finite and positive in the chiral limit, suggesting that the phase transition of massless two-flavor QCD is of second order.