Speaker
Rajan Gupta
(Los Alamos National Lab)
Description
This talk will summarize the results obtained by the HotQCD collaboration on the equation of state and the crossover transition in 2+1 flavor QCD. We will present results on bulk thermodynamic quantities - energy density, pressure, entropy density, and the speed of sound over the temperature range 140 < T < 540 MeV. These results have been obtained on lattices of temporal size $N_\tau = 6$ and 8 and with two improved staggered fermion actions, asqtad and p4. Our most extensive results are with masses of the two degenerate light quarks set at $m_{ud} = 0.1 m_s$ corresponding to the lightest pion mass $m_\pi$ between 220-260 MeV. In these simulations, the strange quark mass is tuned to its physical value and defines lines of constant physics. We will also summarize the current state of results on observables sensitive to the chiral and deconfining physics - the light and strange quark number susceptibilities, the chiral condensate and its susceptibility, and the renormalized Polyakov loop. Our results indicate that the deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration occur in the same narrow temperature interval.
Author
Rajan Gupta
(Los Alamos National Lab)
