Susceptibilities, the Specific Heat and a Cumulant in Two-Flavour QCD

Abstract

We study the quark mass dependence of various response functions, which contribute to chiral susceptibilities and the specific heat in the staggered fermion formulation of two-flavour QCD. This yields information about the critical exponents $\alpha$, $\beta$ and $\delta$. In the case of the chiral susceptibility, obtained as derivative of the chiral order parameter with respect to the quark mass, we calculate all contributions. This allows to construct a cumulant of the order parameter, which is a scaling function and yields a direct determination of the critical exponent $\delta$. All our results are consistent with a second order phase transition.