The nature of the thermal phase transition with Wilson quarks

TL;DR

This paper investigates the nature of the thermal phase transition in high temperature QCD with Wilson quarks through simulations, analyzing thermodynamic and quark properties to understand the transition's characteristics.

Contribution

The study provides new insights into the thermal phase transition in QCD with Wilson quarks, including detailed simulation results and analysis of quark mass and propagator behavior.

Findings

Maximum sharpness of transition at specific parameters

Transition characteristics depend on lattice size and parameters

Quark mass and propagator analyses reveal transition details

Abstract

We describe a series of simulations of high temperature QCD with two flavors of Wilson quarks aimed at clarifying the nature of the high temperature phase found in current simulations. Most of our work is with four time slices, although we include some runs with six and eight time slices for comparison. In addition to the usual thermodynamic observables we study the quark mass defined by the divergence of the axial current and the quark propagator in the Landau gauge. We find that the sharpness of the $N_t=4$ thermal transition has a maximum around $\kappa=0.19$ and $6/g^2=4.8$.