Flavor and Quark Mass Dependence of QCD Thermodynamics

Abstract

We calculate the transition temperature in 2 and 3-flavor QCD using improved gauge and staggered fermion actions on lattices with temporal extent Nt=4. We find Tc=173(8)MeV and 154(8)MeV for nf=2 and 3, respectively. In the case of 3-flavor QCD we present evidence that the chiral critical point, i.e. the second order endpoint of the line of first order chiral phase transitions, belongs to the universality class of the 3d Ising model.