Making the most of Taylor expansion and imaginary chemical potential

Understand

We present preliminary results for the curvature of the pseudocritical line and susceptibilities in Nf = 2 + 1 flavor QCD.

• The computations are carried out on lattice sizes of 16x16x16x4, at matching parameters of early work of the Bielefeld group.
• Emphasis is placed on the control of systematic errors, by cross-validating results obtained by use of the Taylor expansion and measurements at imaginary chemical potential.
• To this end, we generalize the magnetic equation of state to the analysis of the number density, and we extend it to imaginary values of the chemical potential.