The chiral critical point in 3-flavour QCD

We determine the second order endpoint of the line of first order phase transitions. which occur in the light quark mass regime of 3-flavour QCD at finite temperature, and analyze universal properties of this chiral critical point. A detailed analysis of Binder cumulants and the joint probability distributions of energy like and ordering-field like observables confirms that the chiral critical point belongs to the universality class of the three-dimensional Ising model. From a calculation with improved gauge and staggered fermion actions we estimate that the transition is first order for pseudo-scalar meson masses less than about 200 MeV. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.