1993/04/01 by Anna Hasenfratz, Thomas DeGrand, Thomas A. DeGrand · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #hep-lat
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.49.466
published as Phys.Rev. D49 (1994) 466-473 · COLO-HEP-311, 26 pages and 6 postscript figures; file is a shar file and all macros are (hopefully) included
arxiv created 1993/04/01 · openalex publication_date 1994/01/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
It is expected that the only effect of heavy dynamical fermions in QCD is to renormalize the gauge coupling. We derive a simple expression for the shift in the gauge coupling induced by Nf flavors of heavy fermions. We compare this formula to the shift in the gauge coupling at which the confinement-deconfinement phase transition occurs (at fixed lattice size) from numerical simulations as a function of quark mass and Nf. We find remarkable agreement with our expression down to a fairly light quark mass. However, simulations with eight heavy flavors and two light flavors show that the eight flavors do more than just shift the gauge coupling. We observe confinement-deconfinement transitions at \ensuremathβ=0 induced by a large number of heavy quarks. We comment on the relevance of our results to contemporary simulations of QCD which include dynamical fermions.