A parameter independent analysis of the QCD chiral phase transition and its universal critical behaviour

Abstract

We make use of unique properties of scaling functions to estimate the chiral phase transition temperature and corresponding universal critical parameters of this phase transition directly from (2+1)-flavor QCD simulations with highly improved staggered fermions on lattices with temporal extent $N_{\tau }=8$. Working with an improved chiral order parameter for quantifying chiral symmetry breaking, we analyze the finite-volume dependence of this observable for a wide range of lattice volumes and light quark masses, and quantitatively estimate the deviations from the expected universal scaling behaviour as a function of the light-to-strange quark mass ratio.

9 pages, 4 figures, prepared for NIC Symposium Proceedings 2027 to be held at Jülich, Germany