Fermionic boundary conditions and the finite temperature transition of QCD

Understand

Finite temperature lattice QCD is probed by varying the temporal boundary conditions of the fermions.

• We develop the emerging physical behavior in a study of the quenched case and subsequently present first results for a fully dynamical calculation comparing ensembles below and above the phase transition.
• We show that for low temperature spectral quantities of the Dirac operator are insensitive to boundary conditions, while in the deconfined phase a non-trivial response to a variation of the boundary conditions sets in.