Abstract
It is expected that the only effect of heavy dynamical fermions in QCD is to renormalize the gauge coupling. We derive a simple expression for the shift in the gauge coupling induced by ${N}_{f}$ flavors of heavy fermions. We compare this formula to the shift in the gauge coupling at which the confinement-deconfinement phase transition occurs (at fixed lattice size) from numerical simulations as a function of quark mass and ${N}_{f}$. We find remarkable agreement with our expression down to a fairly light quark mass. However, simulations with eight heavy flavors and two light flavors show that the eight flavors do more than just shift the gauge coupling. We observe confinement-deconfinement transitions at $\ensuremath{\beta}=0$ induced by a large number of heavy quarks. We comment on the relevance of our results to contemporary simulations of QCD which include dynamical fermions.
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