Two flavor QCD and Confinement
Abstract
We argue that the order of the chiral transition for N_f=2 is a sensitive probe of the QCD vacuum, in particular of the mechanism of color confinement. A strategy is developed to investigate the order of the transition by use of finite size scaling analysis. An in-depth numerical investigation is performed with staggered fermions on lattices with N_t=4 and N_s=12,16,20,24,32 and quark masses am_q ranging from 0.01335 to 0.307036. The specific heat and a number of susceptibilities are measured and compared with the expectations of an O(4) second order and of a first order phase transition. A second order transition in the O(4) and O(2) universality classes are excluded. Substantial evidence emerges for a first order transition. A detailed comparison with previous works is performed.
Cite
@article{arxiv.hep-lat/0503030,
title = {Two flavor QCD and Confinement},
author = {M. D'Elia and A. Di Giacomo and C. Pica},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-lat/0503030},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
46 pages, 20 eps figures, 9 tables, REVTeX4