Study of finite temperature QCD with 2+1 flavors via Taylor expansion and imaginary chemical potential

TL;DR

This paper investigates the behavior of QCD with 2+1 flavors at finite temperature and chemical potential using lattice simulations, comparing results from imaginary chemical potential and Taylor expansion methods near the critical temperature.

Contribution

It provides preliminary lattice results for QCD thermodynamics with 2+1 flavors at nonzero temperature and chemical potential, utilizing improved staggered fermions and comparing two computational approaches.

Findings

Results obtained at imaginary chemical potential

Comparison between Taylor expansion and imaginary chemical potential methods

Focus on temperature range near the QCD transition

Abstract

We study QCD with 2+1 flavors at nonzero temperature and nonzero chemical potential. We present preliminary results obtained from lattice calculations performed with an improved staggered fermions action (p4-action) on lattice with temporal extent N_t = 4 on a line of constant physics with the strange quark mass adjusted to its physical value and a pion mass of about 220 MeV. We compute at imaginary chemical potential and compare with Taylor expansion results. We focus our study on a range of temperatures 0.94 < T/T_c < 1.08.