Chiral phase transition in three-flavor QCD from lattice QCD
Lorenzo Dini, Prasad Hegde, F. Karsch, Anirban Lahiri, Christian Schmidt, Sipaz Sharma
Abstract
We analyze the pseudocritical behavior of three-flavor QCD using highly improved staggered quarks on lattices with temporal extent ${N}_{\ensuremath{\tau}}=8$ and for quark masses corresponding to a pseudoscalar Goldstone mass in the range $80\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{MeV}\ensuremath{\lesssim}{m}_{\ensuremath{\pi}}\ensuremath{\lesssim}140\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{MeV}$. Our findings are consistent with the occurrence of a second order chiral phase transition at vanishing values of the quark masses. The chiral phase transition temperature at this finite value of the lattice spacing is determined to be ${T}_{c}={98}_{\ensuremath{-}6}^{+3}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{MeV}$. A comparison with a corresponding analysis performed in ($2+1$)-flavor QCD suggests that the continuum limit extrapolated chiral phase transition temperature in three-flavor QCD will turn out to be below 90 MeV.