It is expected that the only effect of heavy dynamical fermions in QCD is to
renormalize the gauge coupling. We derive a simple expression for the shift in
the gauge coupling induced by Nf​ flavors of heavy fermions. We compare this
formula to the shift in the gauge coupling at which the
confinement-deconfinement phase transition occurs (at fixed lattice size) from
numerical simulations as a function of quark mass and Nf​. We find remarkable
agreement with our expression down to a fairly light quark mass. However,
simulations with eight heavy flavors and two light flavors show that the eight
flavors do more than just shift the gauge coupling. We observe
confinement-deconfinement transitions at β=0 induced by a large number of
heavy quarks. We comment on the relevance of our results to contemporary
simulations of QCD which include dynamical fermions.Comment: COLO-HEP-311, 26 pages and 6 postscript figures; file is a shar file
and all macros are (hopefully) include