Speaker
Description
Understanding the properties of strong interaction matter with its physical
spectrum of light and strange quarks near the pseudo-critical temperature
of (2+1)-flavor QCD is one of the central goals of high energy nuclear
physics. It generally is expected that the analytic crossover transition in
QCD is sensitive to properties of the true chiral PHASE transition at
vanishing quark masses [1,2]. This sensitivity is increased in higher order
cumulants of net charge fluctuations which currently are being measured
by STAR and PHENIX at RHIC and by ALICE at the LHC.
In order to connect these experimental findings to predictions arising from
QCD in the chiral limit it is mandatory to establish the properties of QCD in
this limit. While there are many indications that the chiral PHASE
transition is a second order transition in the universality class of O(4)
sigma models [3], this is by no means established in lattice QCD
calculations as in none of these cases continuum extrapolated results
exist [4].
In this talk we will present the status of our calculations for (2+1)-flavor
QCD with the Highly Improved Staggered Quarks (HISQ) on three different
lattice sizes ($N_\tau = 6, 8, 12$) and with 5 values of light quark masses
that are up to a factor 6 smaller than in nature. This allows us to
systematically control the chiral and continuum limit of QCD. We show
that our results are consistent with O(N) scaling in the chiral limit,
supporting the existence of a second order phase transition. We will also
present first continuum extrapolated results for the PHASE transition
temperature in the chiral limit and discuss the relevance of corrections to
scaling that need to be controlled when extrapolating to QCD with its
physical quark mass spectrum.
[1] A. Bazavov et al., PRD 85 (2012) 054503
[2] A. Bazavov et al., PRD95 (2017) 074505
[3] S.-T. Li and H.-T. Ding, PoS LATTICE2016 (2017) 372
[4] H.-T. Ding, F. Karsch, and S. Mukherjee, IJMPE24 (2015) 1530007
| Content type | Theory |
|---|---|
| Collaboration | HotQCD |
| Centralised submission by Collaboration | Presenter name already specified |
