Chiral phase transition of (2+1)-flavor QCD

Abstract: We present here results on the determination of the critical temperature in the chiral limit for (2+1)-flavor QCD. We propose two novel estimators of the chiral critical temperature where quark mass dependence is strongly suppressed compared to the conventional estimator using pseudo-critical temperatures. We have used the HISQ/tree action for the numerical simulation with lattices with three different temporal extent $N_{\tau}=$6, 8, 12 and varied the aspect ratio over the range $4 \leq N_{\sigma}/N_{\tau} \leq 8$. To approach the chiral limit, the light quark mass has been decreased keeping the strange quark mass fixed at its physical value. Our simulations correspond to the range of pion masses, 55 MeV $\leq m_{\pi} \leq$ 160 MeV.