2007/10/31 by M. Cheng, N. H. Christ, Norman H. Christ +20 · 15 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Deconfinement #Fermion #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Nuclear physics #Observable #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Pion #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Quantum chromodynamics #Quantum mechanics #Quark #Strange quark #hep-lat #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.77.014511
published as Phys.Rev.D77:014511,2008 · 22 pages, 17 EPS-figures; revised version, updated references, data added in Tab.1, several smaller changes
arxiv created 2008/01/15 · openalex publication_date 2008/01/22 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We present results on the equation of state in QCD with two light quark flavors and a heavier strange quark. Calculations with improved staggered fermions have been performed on lattices with temporal extent N_\ensuremathτ=4 and 6 on a line of constant physics with almost physical quark mass values; the pion mass is about 220 MeV, and the strange quark mass is adjusted to its physical value. High statistics results on large lattices are obtained for bulk thermodynamic observables, i.e. pressure, energy and entropy density, at vanishing quark chemical potential for a wide range of temperatures, 140 MeV\ensuremath≤T\ensuremath≤800 MeV. We present a detailed discussion of finite cutoff effects which become particularly significant for temperatures larger than about twice the transition temperature. At these high temperatures we also performed calculations of the trace anomaly on lattices with temporal extent N_\ensuremathτ=8. Furthermore, we have performed an extensive analysis of zero temperature observables including the light and strange quark condensates and the static quark potential at zero temperature. These are used to set the temperature scale for thermodynamic observables and to calculate renormalized observables that are sensitive to deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration and become order parameters in the infinite and zero quark mass limits, respectively.