Lattice quantum chromodynamics equation of state: a better differential method

Abstract

We propose a better differential method for the computation of the equation of state of QCD from lattice simulations. In contrast to the earlier differential method, our technique yields positive pressure for all temperatures including the temperatures in the transition region. Employing it on temporal lattices of 8, 10 and 12 sites and by extrapolating to zero lattice spacing we obtained the pressure, energy density, entropy density, specific heat and speed of sound in quenched QCD for 0.9 ≤ T/T_c ≤ 3. At high temperatures comparisons of our results are made with those from the dimensional reduction approach and also with those from a conformal symmetric theory.