The nature of the thermal phase transition with Wilson quarks

Abstract

We describe a series of simulations of high temperature QCD with two flavors of Wilson quarks aimed at clarifying the nature of the high temperature phase found in current simulations. Most of our work is with four time slices, although we include some runs with six and eight time slices for comparison. In addition to the usual thermodynamic observables we study the quark mass defined by the divergence of the axial current and the quark propagator in the Landau gauge. We find that the sharpness of the $N_t=4$ thermal transition has a maximum around $\kappa=0.19$ and $6/g^2=4.8$.