Estimating the chiral-symmetry<i>–</i>restoration temperature in two-flavor QCD

Abstract

We combine measurements of the chiral-symmetry--restoration transition temperature and hadron masses in lattice QCD with two flavors of light quarks to estimate the transition temperature in megaelectronvolts. We compare this estimate to results of ``quenched'' QCD to estimate the effects of our large lattice spacing on the results. We find that the dynamical quarks lower the temperature of the phase transition relative to the pure gauge theory.