Michael Cheng

Chiral and deconfinement aspects of the QCD transition

We present results on the chiral and deconfinement properties of the QCD transition at finite temperature. Calculations are performed with 2 + 1 flavors of quarks using the p4, asqtad, and HISQ/tree actions. Lattices with temporal extent N-tau = 6, 8, and 12 are used to understand and control discretization errors and to reliably extrapolate estimates obtained at finite lattice spacings to the continuum limit. The chiral transition temperature is defined in terms of the phase transition in a theory with two massless flavors and analyzed using O(N) scaling fits to the chiral condensate and susceptibility. We find consistent estimates from the HISQ/tree and asqtad actions and our main result is T-c = 154 +/- 9 MeV.

Equation of state and QCD transition at finite temperature

We calculate the equation of state in

Equation of State for physical quark masses

2+1

The chiral transition and

flavor QCD at finite temperature with physical strange quark mass and almost physical light quark masses using lattices with temporal extent

U(1)_A

{N}_{\ensuremath{\tau}}=8

symmetry restoration from lattice QCD using Domain Wall Fermions

. 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

Finite temperature QCD using2+1flavors of domain wall fermions atNt=8

O({a}^{2})

W W scattering parameters via pseudoscalar phase shifts

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

Lattice study of ChPT beyond QCD

{N}_{\ensuremath{\tau}}=6

Lattice

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 include an estimate of current uncertainties in the lattice calculations which arise from cutoff and quark mass effects.