Evidence for O(2) universality at the finite temperature transition for lattice QCD with 2 flavours of massless staggered quarks

TL;DR

This study provides evidence that the finite temperature transition in lattice QCD with 2 massless quark flavors exhibits O(2) universality, using simulations with a modified action and finite size scaling analysis.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates that the finite temperature transition in lattice QCD with 2 flavors of massless quarks follows O(2) universality, employing a modified action and finite size scaling techniques.

Findings

Chiral condensates fit well to O(2) spin model magnetizations

Correlation lengths and susceptibilities agree with spin model predictions

Finite size effects explain previous inconsistent scaling results

Abstract

We simulate lattice QCD with 2 flavours of massless quarks on lattices of temporal extent N_t=8, to study the finite temperature transition from hadronic matter to a quark-gluon plasma. A modified action which incorporates an irrelevant chiral 4-fermion interaction is used, which allows simulations at zero quark mass. We obtain excellent fits of the chiral condensates to the magnetizations of a 3-dimensional O(2) spin model on lattices small enough to model the finite size effects. This gives predictions for correlation lengths and chiral susceptibilities from the corresponding spin-model quantities. These are in good agreement with our measurements over the relevant range of parameters. Binder cumulants are measured, but the errors are too large to draw definite conclusions. From the properties of the O(2) spin model on the relatively small lattices with which we fit our `data', we can see why earlier attempts to fit staggered lattice data to leading-order infinite-volume scaling functions, as well as finite size scaling studies, failed and led to erroneous conclusions.