The Spatial String Tension and Dimensional Reduction in QCD

TL;DR

This paper investigates the spatial string tension in (2+1) flavor QCD with physical quark masses, demonstrating that dimensional reduction accurately describes the system down to 1.5 times the critical temperature.

Contribution

It provides lattice QCD calculations of the spatial string tension with physical quark masses and compares these results with dimensional reduction predictions.

Findings

Dimensional reduction describes the spatial string tension well down to 1.5T_c.

Lattice results agree with reduced QCD predictions across multiple lattice spacings.

Supports the applicability of dimensional reduction in realistic QCD scenarios.

Abstract

We calculate the spatial string tension in (2+1) flavor QCD with physical strange quark mass and almost physical light quark masses using lattices with temporal extent N_tau=4,6 and 8. We compare our results on the spatial string tension with predictions of dimensionally reduced QCD. This suggests that also in the presence of light dynamical quarks dimensional reduction works well down to temperatures 1.5T_c.