Thermodynamics with 3 and 2+1 Flavors of Improved Staggered Quarks

Abstract

We present preliminary results from exploring the phase diagram of finite temperature QCD with three degenerate flavors and with two light flavors and the mass of the third held approximately at the strange quark mass. We use an order ${\alpha }_s^2{a}^2,a^4$ Symanzik improved gauge action and an order ${\alpha }_s{a}^2,a^4$ improved staggered quark action. The improved staggered action leads to a dispersion relation with diminished lattice artifacts, and hence better thermodynamic properties. It decreases the flavor symmetry breaking of staggered quarks substantially, and we estimate that at the transition temperature for an $N_t=8$ to $N_t=10$ lattice {\em all} pions will be lighter than the lightest kaon. Preliminary results on lattices with $N_t=4$, 6 and 8 are presented.

arXiv comment3 pages, 6 figures, contribution to Lattice2001(hightemp) August 19--24, 2001, Berlin, Germany

References in corpus (8)

• The QCD spectrum with three quark flavors
• Variants of fattening and flavor symmetry restoration
• Flavor-Symmetry Restoration and Symanzik Improvement for Staggered Quarks
• The static quark potential in three flavor QCD
• Scaling tests of the improved Kogut-Susskind quark action
• Phase structure of lattice QCD at finite temperature for 2+1 flavors of Kogut-Susskind quarks
• Lattice QCD at finite temperature
• Improved flavor symmetry in Kogut-Susskind fermion actions

Cited by in corpus (3)

• QCD Thermodynamics with Three Flavors of Improved Staggered Quarks
• Hydrodynamical evolution near the QCD critical end point
• Three Flavor QCD at High Temperatures