No Arabic abstract
We discuss the use of Wilson fermions with twisted mass for simulations of QCD thermodynamics. As a prerequisite for a future analysis of the finite-temperature transition making use of automatic O(a) improvement, we investigate the phase structure in the space spanned by the hopping parameter kappa, the coupling beta, and the twisted mass parameter mu. We present results for N_f=2 degenerate quarks on a 16^3x8 lattice, for which we investigate the possibility of an Aoki phase existing at strong coupling and vanishing mu, as well as of a thermal phase transition at moderate gauge couplings and non-vanishing mu.
We address the interpretation of the Landau gauge gluon propagator at finite temperature as a massive type bosonic propagator. Using pure gauge SU(3) lattice simulations at a fixed lattice volume $sim(6.5fm)^3$, we compute the electric and magnetic form factors, extract a gluon mass from Yukawa-like fits, and study its temperature dependence. This is relevant both for the Debye screening at high temperature $T$ and for confinement at low $T$.
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 Nt=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 Nt=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
We study the topological charge in $N_f=2$ QCD at finite temperature using Mobius domain-wall fermions. The susceptibility $chi_t$ of the topological charge defined either by the index of overlap Dirac operator or a gluonic operator is investigated at several values of temperature $T (>T_c)$ varying the quark mass. A strong suppression of the susceptibility is observed below a certain value of the quark mass. The relation with the restoration of $U_A(1)$ is discussed.
We present the results of an extended scaling test of quenched Wilson twisted mass QCD. We fix the twist angle by using two definitions of the critical mass, the first obtained by requiring the vanishing of the pseudoscalar meson mass m_PS for standard Wilson fermions and the second by requiring restoration of parity at non-zero value of the twisted mass mu and subsequently extrapolating to mu=0. Depending on the choice of the critical mass we simulate at values of beta in [5.7,6.45], for a range of pseudoscalar meson masses 250 MeV < m_PS < 1 GeV and we perform the continuum limit for the pseudoscalar meson decay constant f_PS and various hadron masses (vector meson m_V, baryon octet m_oct and baryon decuplet m_dec) at fixed value of r_0 m_PS. For both definitions of the critical mass, lattice artifacts are consistent with O(a) improvement. However, with the second definition, large O(a^2) discretization errors present at small quark mass with the first definition are strongly suppressed. The results in the continuum limit are in very good agreement with those from the Alpha and CP-PACS Collaborations.
We study the phase structure of lattice QCD with heavy quarks at finite temperature and density by a histogram method. We determine the location of the critical point at which the first-order deconfining transition in the heavy-quark limit turns into a crossover at intermediate quark masses through a change of the shape of the histogram under variation of coupling parameters. We estimate the effect of the complex phase factor which causes the sign problem at finite density, and show that, in heavy-quark QCD, the effect is small around the critical point. We determine the critical surface in 2+1 flavor QCD in the heavy-quark region at all values of the chemical potential mu including mu=infty.