Finite temperature properties of QCD with two flavors and three, four and five colors

Abstract

I present a numerical study of the crossover between the low temperature chirally broken phase and the high temperature chirally restored phase in $SU(N_c)$ gauge theory with $N_c=3-5$ colors and $N_f=2$ degenerate fermion flavors. Fermion masses span a range of intermediate values (represented by the squared ratio of pseudoscalar to vector meson masses $(m_{PS}/m_V{)}^2\sim 0.25$ to 0.63). Observables include the temperature dependent chiral condensate and screening masses. At each fermion mass these quantities show nearly identical temperature dependence across $N_c$.

Comments: published version, small changes from v.1, 24 pages, 9 figures