The deconfining phase transition in full QCD with two dynamical flavors

Abstract

We investigate the deconfining phase transition in SU(3) pure gauge theory and in full QCD with two flavors of staggered fermions. The phase transition is detected by measuring the free energy in presence of an abelian monopole background field. In the pure gauge case our finite size scaling analysis is in agreement with the well known presence of a weak first order phase transition. In the case of 2 flavors full QCD we find, using the standard pure gauge and staggered fermion actions, that the phase transition is consistent with weak first order, contrary to the expectation of a crossover for not too large quark masses and in agreement with results obtained by the Pisa group.Comment: 23 pages, 11 figures, 4 tables (minor typos corrected, references updated, accepted for publication on JHEP