Chiral transition temperature and aspects of deconfinement in 2+1 flavor   QCD with the HISQ/tree action
  We present results on the chiral transition temperature Tc in 2+1 flavor QCD extrapolated to the continuum limit and the physical light quark mass. The extrapolations are based on the data from simulations on lattices with temporal extent Ntau=6, 8 and 12 with the HISQ/tree and Ntau=8 and 12 with the asqtad action. The chiral transition is analyzed in terms of universal O(N) scaling functions. After performing simultaneous asqtad and HISQ/tree continuum extrapolation the chiral transition temperature is Tc=154 +/- 9 MeV. We also discuss the deconfinement aspects of the transition in terms of the renormalized Polyakov loop, fluctuations and correlations of several conserved charges and the trace anomaly. 
Alexei Bazavov, for HotQCD collaboration
hep-lat hep-ph nucl-th