QCD thermodynamics with two flavors at Nt=6.

Abstract

The first results of numerical simulations of quantum chromodynamics on the Intel iPSC/860 parallel processor are presented. We performed calculations with two flavors of Kogut-Susskind quarks at {ital N}{sub {ital t}}=6 with masses of 0.15{ital T} and 0.075{ital T} (0.025 and 0.0125 in lattice units) in order to locate the crossover from the low-temperature regime of ordinary hadronic matter to the high-temperature chirally symmetric regime. As with other recent two-flavor simulations, these calculations are insufficient to distinguish between a rapid crossover and a true phase transition. The phase transition is either absent or feeble at this quark mass. An improved estimate of the crossover temperature in physical units is given and results are presented for the hadronic screening lengths in both the high- and low-temperature regimes.