Flavour degrees of freedom and the transition temperature in QCD
We study the finite temperature transition in QCD with four flavours of dynamical quarks. Our simulation is performed on an 8×16 3 lattice for quarks of mass ma=0.01. At the coupling β c =5.15, we find long-lived metastable states, as well as an abrupt change in the entropy density, suggesting a first order phase transition. Using presently available results from corresponding calculations of the