@article{oai:niigata-u.repo.nii.ac.jp:00002351, author = {Allton, C.R. and Ejiri, S. and Hands, S.J. and Kaczmarek, O. and Karsch, F. and Laermann, E. and Schmidt, C. and Scorzato, L.}, issue = {7}, journal = {Physical Review D, Physical Review D}, month = {Oct}, note = {We propose a new method to investigate the thermal properties of QCD with a small quark chemical potential μ. Derivatives of quark and gluonic observables with respect to μ are computed at μ=0 for two flavors of p4 improved staggered fermions with ma=0.1,0.2 on a 16 3 ×4 lattice, and used to calculate the leading order Taylor expansion in μ of the location of the pseudocritical point about μ=0. This expansion should be well behaved for the small values of μ q /T c ∼0.1 relevant for BNL RHIC phenomenology, and predicts a critical curve T c (μ) in reasonable agreement with estimates obtained using exact reweighting. In addition, we contrast the case of isoscalar and isovector chemical potentials, quantify the effect of μ≠0 on the equation of state, and comment on the complex phase of the fermion determinant in QCD with μ≠0.}, title = {QCD thermal phase transition in the presence of a small chemical potential}, volume = {66}, year = {2002} }