We study the end point of the first-order deconfinement phase transition in two and 2+1 flavor QCD in the heavy quark region of the quark mass parameter space. We determine the location of critical point at which the first-order deconfinement phase transition changes to crossover, and calculate the pseudo-scalar meson mass at the critical point. Performing quenched QCD simulations on lattices with the temporal extents N t = 6 and 8, the effects of heavy quarks are determined using the reweighting method. We adopt the hopping parameter expansion to evaluate the quark determinants in the reweighting factor. We estimate the truncation error of the hopping parameter expansion by comparing the results of leading and next-toleading order calculations, and study the lattice spacing dependence as well as the spatial volume dependence of the result for the critical point. The overlap problem of the reweighting method is also examined. Our results for N t = 4 and 6 suggest that the critical quark mass decreases as the lattice spacing decreases and increases as the spatial volume increases.

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We study the endpoint of the first order deconfinement phase transition of 2 and 2+1 flavor QCD in the heavy quark region. We perform simulations of quenched QCD and apply the reweighting method to study the heavy quark region. The quark determinant for the reweighting is evaluated by a hopping parameter expansion. To reduce the overlap problem, we introduce an external source term of the Polyakov loop in the simulation. We study the location of critical point at which the first order phase transition changes to crossover by investigating the histogram of the Polyakov loop and applying the finite-size scaling analysis. We estimate the truncation error of the hopping parameter expansion, and discuss the lattice spacing dependence and the spatial volume dependence in the result of the critical point.