Flavor and Quark Mass Dependence of QCD Thermodynamics

TL;DR

This paper calculates the QCD transition temperature for 2 and 3 flavors using lattice simulations and investigates the nature of the chiral critical point, providing key thermodynamic insights.

Contribution

It provides new estimates of the QCD transition temperature for different quark flavors and identifies the universality class of the chiral critical point in 3-flavor QCD.

Findings

Transition temperature for nf=2: 173(8) MeV

Transition temperature for nf=3: 154(8) MeV

Chiral critical point belongs to 3d Ising universality class

Abstract

We calculate the transition temperature in 2 and 3-flavor QCD using improved gauge and staggered fermion actions on lattices with temporal extent Nt=4. We find Tc=173(8)MeV and 154(8)MeV for nf=2 and 3, respectively. In the case of 3-flavor QCD we present evidence that the chiral critical point, i.e. the second order endpoint of the line of first order chiral phase transitions, belongs to the universality class of the 3d Ising model.