Chiral transition and deconfinement transition in QCD with the highly improved staggered quark (HISQ) action

TL;DR

This paper investigates the chiral and deconfinement transitions in finite-temperature QCD using the HISQ lattice action, providing continuum estimates and comparing results with other improved staggered quark actions.

Contribution

It presents preliminary lattice QCD results on chiral and deconfinement transitions with the HISQ action, including continuum estimates and comparison with other methods.

Findings

Good agreement with continuum extrapolated results from stout staggered quark action.

Continuum estimates for quark condensates, susceptibilities, and Polyakov loop.

Evidence of consistent chiral and deconfinement transition signals.

Abstract

We report preliminary results on the chiral and deconfinement aspects of the QCD transition at finite temperature using the Highly Improved Staggered Quark (HISQ) action on lattices with temporal extent of N_{\tau}=6 and 8. The chiral aspects of the transition are studied in terms of quark condensates and the disconnected chiral susceptibility. We study the deconfinement transition in terms of the strange quark number susceptibility and the renormalized Polyakov loop. We made continuum estimates for some quantities and find reasonably good agreement between our results and the recent continuum extrapolated results obtained with the stout staggered quark action.