The Chiral Phase Transition in three-flavor QCD from Lattice QCD

Abstract

We analyze the pseudo-critical behavior of three-flavor QCD using highly improved staggered quarks (HISQ) on lattices with temporal extent $N_{\tau }=8$ and for quark masses corresponding to a pseudoscalar Goldstone mass in the range $80\mathrm{MeV}\lesssim m_{\pi }\lesssim 140\mathrm{MeV}$. 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 $T_c=98_{-6}^{+3}\mathrm{MeV}$. A comparison with a corresponding analysis performed in (2+1)-flavor QCD suggests that the continuum limit extrapolated chiral phase transition temperature in 3-flavor QCD will turn out to be below $90\mathrm{MeV}$.

Comments: 12 pages, 11 figures. Corrected a few typos, cited two new references and added a reference for data publication. Corrected a typo in Eq. 3