Speaker
Description
The nature of the QCD phase transition in the chiral limit presents a challenging problem for lattice QCD. However, its study provides constraints on the phase diagram at the physical point. In this work, we investigate how the order of the chiral phase transition depends on the number of massless quark flavors. To approach the lattice chiral limit, we map out the chiral critical surface that separates the first-order region from the crossover region in an extended parameter space, which includes the gauge coupling, the number of quark flavors, their masses, and the lattice spacing. Lattice simulations with standard staggered quarks reveal that for $N_f \lesssim 8$, there exists a tricritical lattice spacing $a^{tric}(N_f)$, at which the chiral transition changes from first order ($a>a_{tric}$) to second order ($a
| Category | Theory |
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