Study of chiral and deconfinement transition in lattice QCD with improved staggered actions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the chiral and deconfinement transitions in lattice QCD at finite temperature using improved staggered actions, achieving a continuum extrapolation to determine the critical temperature around 157 MeV.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of QCD phase transitions with improved lattice actions and offers a precise estimate of the critical temperature through continuum extrapolation.

Findings

Critical temperature T_c = 157 +/- 6 MeV determined.

Controlled approach to the continuum limit with multiple lattice spacings.

Analysis of chiral transition using universal O(N) scaling functions.

Abstract

We present results on the chiral and deconfinement properties of the QCD transition at finite temperature. We performed calculations using asqtad and HISQ/tree actions using lattices with temporal extent N_tau=6, 8 and 12 allowing to control the approach to the continuum limit. We analyze the chiral transition in terms of universal O(N) scaling functions. From peaks in the scaling functions we perform a simultaneous continuum extrapolation for HISQ/tree and asqtad to derive the critical temperature, T_c= 157 +/- 6 MeV.