Equation of state and QCD transition at finite temperature

Abstract

We calculate the equation of state in 2+1 flavor QCD at finite temperature with physical strange quark mass and almost physical light quark masses using lattices with temporal extent Nτ = 8. Calculations have been performed with two different improved staggered fermion actions, the asqtad and p4 actions. Overall, we find good agreement between results obtained with these two O(a 2 ) improved staggered fermion discretization schemes. A comparison with earlier calculations on coarser lattices is performed to quantify systematic errors in current studies of the equation of state. We also present results for observables that are sensitive to deconfining and chiral aspects of the QCD transition on Nτ = 6 and 8 lattices. We find that deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration happen in the same narrow temperature interval. In an Appendix we present a simple parametrization of the equation of state that can easily be used in hydrodynamic model calculations. In this parametrization we also incorporated an estimate of current uncertainties in the lattice calculations which arise from cutoff and quark mass effects. We estimate these systematic effects to be about 10 MeV.

Role of center vortices in chiral symmetry breaking in SU(3) gauge theory

“…It is tempting to attribute these two phenomena to a single underlying mechanism, an idea supported by finite-temperature studies where the deconfinement and chiral restoration transitions are observed to occur at similar temperatures [1][2][3]. Lowlying modes of the quark operator, known to dominate D SB, are also correlated with the finite-temperature transition of the Polyakov loop, and hence confinement [4][5][6][7].…”

AdS/CFT Duality User Guide

“…Finally, we list review articles and textbooks which cover applications of AdS/CFT [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26]. These cover the materials which are not covered in this book and are useful complements.…”

“…So far we have not specified the form of the metric, but the metric is determined by the Einstein equation 3 : 26) where G is the Newton's constant, and T µν is the energy-momentum tensor of matter fields. The Einstein equation claims that the spacetime curvature is determined by the energy-momentum tensor of matter fields.…”

“…The Lorentz transformation properties are different, but they all come from similar string oscillations, which means that all these fields transform as the adjoint representation of SU(N c ). Namely, the theory has no fundamental representation such as quarks 26 . These properties coincide with the N = 4 SYM.…”

“…Fig . 12.6 The entropy density by lattice simulations [26]. 'SB" represents the scale-invariant free gas one.…”