Many flavor approach to study the nature of chiral phase transition of two-flavor QCD

TL;DR

This study uses lattice simulations to analyze the chiral phase transition in two-flavor QCD, revealing it is likely of second order in the chiral limit by examining the dependence on heavy quark mass.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach by incorporating heavy quarks via hopping parameter expansion to determine the nature of the phase transition in two-flavor QCD.

Findings

Critical heavy mass remains finite in the chiral limit.

The phase transition is suggested to be of second order.

The shape of the effective potential indicates the transition type.

Abstract

We perform lattice numerical simulations to study the phase transition of QCD at finite temperature to clarify the nature of the transition of massless two flavor QCD. We investigate QCD with two light and Nf heavy quarks instead of two-flavor QCD, and focus on the light quark mass dependence of the critical heavy mass, below which the transition is of first order. The heavy quarks are incorporated into two flavor configurations in the form of the hopping parameter expansion through the reweighting technique. The nature of the transition is identified by the shape of the constraint effective potential at the critical temperature. Our result indicates that the critical heavy mass remains finite in the chiral limit of the two flavors, suggesting the phase transition of massless two-flavor QCD is of second order.