The curvature of the chiral pseudocritical line from LQCD: analytic continuation and Taylor expansion compared

Abstract: We present a determination of the curvature $\kappa$ of the chiral pseudocritical line from $N_f=2+1$ lattice QCD at the physical point obtained by adopting the Taylor expansion approach. Numerical simulations performed at three lattice spacings lead to a continuum extrapolated curvature $\kappa = 0.0145(25)$, a value that is in excellent agreement with continuum limit estimates obtained via analytic continuation within the same discretization scheme, $\kappa = 0.0135(20)$. The agreement between the two calculations is a solid consistency check for both methods.