Critical mass in nonzero temperature QCD with staggered fermions

Abstract

The behaviour of the chiral condensate in QCD is investigated by means of a study of the distribution of the zeros of the partition function in the complex quark mass plane. Simulations are performed at fixed temperature on three different spatial volumes at $\beta=5.04$ and at $\beta=4.9$ and $\beta=5.2$ on a $4^4$ lattice. Evidence is found for a chirally related transition at non-zero quark mass in the intermediate coupling region for $\beta < 5.2 $ but superimposed upon a smooth behaviour for the condensate. The critical mass at which this transition is found is only weakly dependent on the spatial volume and decreas with decreasing temperature.