High temperature QCD with three flavors of improved staggered quarks

Abstract

We present an update of our study of high temperature QCD with three flavors of quarks, using a Symanzik improved gauge action and the Asqtad staggered quark action. Simulations are being carried out on lattices with Nt=4, 6 and 8 for the case of three degenerate quarks with masses less than or equal to the strange quark mass, $m_s$, and on lattices with Nt=6 and 8 for degenerate up and down quarks with masses in the range 0.2 m_s \leq m_{u,d} \leq 0.6 m_s, and the strange quark fixed near its physical value. We also report on first computations of quark number susceptibilities with the Asqtad action. These susceptibilities are of interest because they can be related to event-by-event fluctuations in heavy ion collision experiments. Use of the improved quark action leads to a substantial reduction in lattice artifacts. This can be seen already for free fermions and carries over into our results for QCD.

Lattice2002(Non-zero temperature and density)

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Finite density QCD via imaginary chemical potential
• Thermodynamics of Two Flavor QCD to Sixth Order in Quark Chemical Potential
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• Advances in perturbative thermal field theory
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• Free energy of a static quark anti-quark pair and the renormalized Polyakov loop in three flavor QCD
• The strongly interacting Quark Gluon Plasma, and the critical behaviour of QCD at imaginary chemical potential
• Mesonic correlation lengths in high-temperature QCD
• Elliptic flow of resonances at RHIC: probing final state interactions and the structure of resonances
• QCD Thermodynamics on lattice
• Method for comparing finite temperature field theory results with lattice data
• Lattice results with three quark flavours