Finite temperature QCD using 2+1 flavors of domain wall fermions at Nt=8

We study the region of the QCD phase transition using 2 + 1 flavors of domain wall fermions and a 16(3) x 8 lattice volume with a fifth dimension of L-s = 32. The disconnected light quark chiral susceptibility, quark number susceptibility, and the Polyakov loop suggest a chiral and deconfining crossover transition lying between 155 and 185 MeV for our choice of quark mass and lattice spacing. In this region the lattice scale deduced from the Sommer parameter r(0) is a(-1) approximate to 1.3 GeV, the pion mass is approximate to 300 MeV, and the kaon mass is approximately physical. The peak in the chiral susceptibility implies a pseudocritical temperature T-c = 171(10)(17) MeV where the first error is associated with determining the peak location and the second with our unphysical light quark mass and nonzero lattice spacing. The effects of residual chiral symmetry breaking on the chiral condensate and disconnected chiral susceptibility are studied using several values of the valence L-s.