Toward a precise determination of Tc with 2+1 flavors of quarks

Abstract

We present a status report on a new high statistics study of the high temperature transition in full QCD at zero chemical potential. Our simulations use both improved asqtad and p4 staggered quarks on lattices with a temporal extent N_t = 8 and light quark masses approximately one tenth the strange quark mass. In this report we describe the setup of our calculations and present a preliminary analysis of a variety of sources of systematic error and ambiguity in the determination of the crossover temperature. We propose to present our final analysis with double the current statistics. These calculations were carried out on the IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.