Progress on the nature of the QCD thermal transition as a function of quark flavors and masses

Abstract

We investigate to which extent we can exploit the dependence of the order of the chiral transition on the number of light degenerate flavors $N_\text{f}$, re-interpreted as continuous parameter in the path integral formulation, as a means to perform a controlled chiral extrapolation and deduce the order of the transition for the case $N_\text{f}=2$, which is still under debate.