Chiral transition temperature and aspects of deconfinement in 2+1 flavor QCD with the HISQ/tree action

Abstract

We present results on the chiral transition temperature Tc in 2+1 flavor QCD extrapolated to the continuum limit and the physical light quark mass. The extrapolations are based on the data from simulations on lattices with temporal extent Ntau=6, 8 and 12 with the HISQ/tree and Ntau=8 and 12 with the asqtad action. The chiral transition is analyzed in terms of universal O(N) scaling functions. After performing simultaneous asqtad and HISQ/tree continuum extrapolation the chiral transition temperature is Tc=154 +/- 9 MeV. We also discuss the deconfinement aspects of the transition in terms of the renormalized Polyakov loop, fluctuations and correlations of several conserved charges and the trace anomaly.