Finite-temperature phase transition of SU(3) gauge theory on Nt=4 and 6 lattices

The deconfining finite-temperature transition of SU(3) gauge theory is studied on the dedicated parallel computer QCDPAX. Monte Carlo simulations are performed on 122x24x4, 242x36x4, 203x6, 243x6, and 362x48x6 lattices with 376 000 to 1 112 000 iterations. The finite size scaling behavior of the first-order transition is confirmed both on the Nt=4 and Nt=6 lattices and clear two-phase structures are observed on spatially large lattices (242x36x4 and 362x48x6). The latent heat at the deconfining transition is estimated both by a direct measurement of the gap on the spatially large lattices and by applying a finite-size scaling law. The results obtained by these two independent methods are remarkably consistent with each other on both the Nt=4 and 6 lattices. The latent heat for Nt=6 is much smaller than that for Nt=4 and is about 1/3 of the Stefan-Boltzmann value 8π2/15. The details of the data and the error analysis are presented