Locating the 3-flavor critical point using staggered fermions

Abstract

We describe a high-statistics investigation of the critical behavior as the quark mass, m approaches the endpoint m c of the first-order line separating the chirally symmetric and asymmetric phases in 3-flavor QCD using the Binder cumulant intersection method. This method and the resulting value of m c is compared with an earlier study using extrapolation of screening masses to m c . These results are obtained on lattice volumes of 8 3 × 4, 16 3 × 4 and 32 3 × 4 using staggered fermion masses of 0.015, 0.02, 0.025, 0.03, 0.035, 0.04 and 0.045.