The chiral phase transition temperature in (2+1)-flavor QCD
The chiral phase transition temperature T0cT0c is a fundamental quantity of QCD. To determine this quantity we have performed simulations of (2 + 1)-flavor QCD using the Highly Improved Staggered Quarks (HISQ/tree) action on Nτ=6, 8 and 12 lattices with aspect ratios Nσ/Nτ ranging from 4 to 8. In our simulations we fix the strange quark mass to its physical value mphys, and vary the values of two degenerate light quark masses ml from mphys/20 to mphys/160 which correspond to a Goldstone pion mass mπ ranging from 160 MeV to 55 MeV in the continuum limit. We employ two estimators T60 and Tδ to extract the chiral phase transition temperature T0c, after taking the chiral limit, thermodynamic limit and continuum limit, we present our current estimate for T0c=132+3−6 MeV.
