First-order chiral phase transition in lattice QCD

The chiral phase transition in lattice QCD has been studied for light fermions of mass ma=0.025 on lattices of size 4⁴ and 8³×4 using the hybrid algorithm. We find evidence for a first-order chiral phase transition with a large latent heat. A comparison with 10³×6 data shows violations of asymptotic scaling for T_ch which are similar in magnitude to those observed in the pure gauge sector.