Chiral Lagrangians at finite temperature and the Polyakov Loop

Abstract

Heat kernel expansions at finite temperature of massless QCD and chiral quark models generate effective actions relevant for both low and high temperature QCD. The key relevance of the Polyakov Loop to maintain the large and non-perturbative gauge invariance at finite temperature is stressed.

Comments: Talk given at 6th Conference on Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum, Villasimius, Sardinia, Italy, 21-25 Sep 2004