Chiral phase transition of (2+1)-flavor QCD

TL;DR

This paper determines the critical temperature for the chiral phase transition in (2+1)-flavor QCD using novel estimators that reduce quark mass dependence, based on lattice simulations with varying parameters.

Contribution

It introduces two new estimators for the chiral critical temperature that are less sensitive to quark mass variations, improving accuracy in the chiral limit.

Findings

Proposed two novel estimators for critical temperature.

Performed lattice simulations with multiple lattice sizes and pion masses.

Estimated the critical temperature in the chiral limit.

Abstract

We present here results on the determination of the critical temperature in the chiral limit for (2+1)-flavor QCD. We propose two novel estimators of the chiral critical temperature where quark mass dependence is strongly suppressed compared to the conventional estimator using pseudo-critical temperatures. We have used the HISQ/tree action for the numerical simulation with lattices with three different temporal extent $N_{\tau}=$6, 8, 12 and varied the aspect ratio over the range $4 \leq N_{\sigma}/N_{\tau} \leq 8$. To approach the chiral limit, the light quark mass has been decreased keeping the strange quark mass fixed at its physical value. Our simulations correspond to the range of pion masses, 55 MeV $\leq m_{\pi} \leq$ 160 MeV.