Speaker
Ruben Kara
Description
QCD with heavy dynamical quarks exhibits a first order thermal transition which is driven by the spontaneous breaking of the global Z_3 center symmetry. Decreasing the quark masses weakens the transition until the corresponding latent heat vanishes at the critical mass. We explore the heavy mass region with three flavors of staggered quarks and analyze the Polyakov loop and its moments in a finite volume scaling study. We calculate the heavy critical mass in the three flavor theory in the infinite volume limit for several temporal extensions.
