We study the off-shell mixing and renormalization of flavor-diagonal dimension-5 T- and P-odd operators involving quarks, gluons, and photons, including quark electric dipole and chromo-electric dipole operators. We present the renormalization matrix
to one-loop in the $bar{rm MS}$ scheme. We also provide a definition of the quark chromo-electric dipole operator in a regularization-independent momentum-subtraction scheme suitable for non-perturbative lattice calculations and present the matching coefficients with the $bar{rm MS}$ scheme to one-loop in perturbation theory, using both the naive dimensional regularization and t Hooft-Veltman prescriptions for $gamma_5$.
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
