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The order of the chiral phase transition of lattice QCD with unimproved staggered fermions is known to depend on the number of quark flavours, their masses and the lattice spacing. Previous studies in the literature for Nf∈{3,4} show first-order transitions, which weaken with decreasing lattice spacing. Here we investigate what happens when lattices are made coarser to establish contact to the strong coupling region. For Nf∈{4,8} we find a drastic weakening of the transition when going from Nτ=4 to Nτ=2, which is consistent with a second-order chiral transition reported in the literature for Nf=4 in the strong coupling limit. This implies a non-monotonic behaviour of the critical quark or pseudo-scalar meson mass, which separates first-order transitions from crossover behaviour, as a function of lattice spacing.
Quenched QCD at zero baryonic chemical potential undergoes a first-order deconfinement phase transition at a critical temperature Tc, which is related to the spontaneous breaking of the global center symmetry. Including heavy, dynamical quarks breaks the center symmetry explicitly and weakens the first-order phase transition. For decreasing quark masses the first-order phase transition turns into a smooth crossover at a Z2-critical point. The critical quark mass corresponding to this point has been examined with Nf=2 Wilson fermions for several Nτ in a recent study within our group. For comparison, we also locate the critical point with Nf=2 staggered fermions on Nτ=8 lattices. For this purpose we perform Monte Carlo simulations for several quark mass values and various aspect ratios in order to extrapolate to the thermodynamic limit. The critical mass is obtained by fitting to a finite size scaling formula of the kurtosis of the Polyakov loop. Our results indicate large discretization effects, requiring simulations on lattices with Nτ>8.
We report on the status of ongoing investigations aiming at locating the deconfinement critical point with standard Wilson fermions and Nf = 2 flavors towards the continuum limit (standard Columbia plot); locating the tricritical masses at imaginary chemical potential with unimproved staggered fermions at Nf = 2 (extended Columbia plot); identifying the order of the chiral phase transition at μ = 0 for Nf = 2 via extrapolation from non integer Nf (alternative Columbia plot).