Topological structure of lattice QCD near the chiral phase transition

The topological structure of lattice QCD is studied in the neighborhood of the chiral phase transition. We calculate the topological susceptibility for the lattice gauge field configurations obtained by the MTc collaboration for staggered fermions with four flavors and a quark mass am=0.01 and couplings β=5.1, 5.15, 5.2 at lattice size 8*163. We see a clear suppression of topological fluctuations in the chirally restored phase as proposed by Ward-Takahashi identities and chiral perturbation theory