Chiral Aspects of Improved Staggered Fermions with 2+1-Flavors from the HotQCD Collaboration

TL;DR

This paper reports on lattice QCD simulations using improved staggered fermions to study chiral symmetry and confinement near the high temperature crossover, providing new results at different lattice sizes and fermion actions.

Contribution

It presents new lattice simulation results with improved staggered fermions at various lattice sizes and near physical pion masses, focusing on chiral and confinement observables.

Findings

Results at Nt=12 with nearly physical pion mass

Simulations with HISQ fermions at Nt=6 and 8

Insights into taste-symmetry breaking effects

Abstract

We present recent results from lattice simulations of 2+1 flavors of improved staggered fermions at zero baryon number density near the high temperature crossover. Included are new results from simulations of asqtad fermions at Nt = 12 and a nearly physical Goldstone pion mass and from simulations of HISQ fermions at Nt = 6 and 8. We focus on observables sensitive to chiral symmetry and confinement. A companion HotQCD talk discusses the effects of staggered-fermion taste-symmetry breaking on thermodynamic quantities.