Study of the finite temperature transition in 3-flavor QCD

Abstract

We study the finite temperature transition in QCD with three flavors of equal masses using the R and RHMC algorithms on lattices with temporal extent ${N}_{\ensuremath{\tau}}=4$ and 6. For the transition temperature in the continuum limit we find ${r}_{0}{T}_{c}=0.429(8)$ for the light pseudoscalar mass corresponding to the endpoint of the 1st order transition region. When comparing the results obtained with the R and RHMC algorithms for p4fat3 action we see no significant step-size errors down to a lightest pseudoscalar mass of ${m}_{\mathrm{ps}}{r}_{0}=0.4$.