Quark number susceptibilities and equation of state at finite chemical potential in staggered QCD with Nt=8

Abstract

We report the measurement of quark number susceptibilities (QNS) and their temperature dependence from simulations of QCD with two flavours of light dynamical staggered quarks at finite temperature on 8 * 32^3 lattices. From the radius of convergence of the Taylor expansion we estimate the critical end point. We use a Pade approximant to resum the series expansion and compute the equation of state at finite chemical potential, namely the baryon number density and its contribution to the pressure. We also report the isothermal compressibility of QCD matter at finite baryon density. Finally we explore the freezeout conditions for a measure of fluctuations. We examine some sources of systematic and statistical errors in all of these measurements.