U. M. Heller

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

Review of lattice results concerning low-energy particle physics: Flavour Lattice Averaging Group (FLAG)

2+1

B- and D-meson decay constants from three-flavor lattice QCD

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

Fluctuations and correlations of net baryon number, electric charge, and strangeness: A comparison of lattice QCD results with the hadron resonance gas model

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

QCD thermodynamics with three flavors of improved staggered quarks

. 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

Semileptonic decays of d mesons in three-flavor lattice QCD.

O({a}^{2})

Unquenched quark propagator in Landau gauge

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

B →d ν form factors at nonzero recoil and |Vcb | from 2+1 -flavor lattice QCD

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

Semileptonic D→π/K and B→π/D decays in 2+1 flavor lattice QCD

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.