Continuum study of deconfinement at finite temperature

Abstract

Deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration are explored in a confining, renormalisable, Dyson-Schwinger equation model of two-flavour QCD. An order parameter for deconfinement is introduced and used to establish that, in the chiral limit, deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration are coincident at $T_c\approx 150$MeV. The transitions are second order and each has the same critical exponent: $\beta \approx 0.3$. The deconfinement transition is found to exhibit sensitivity to the current-quark mass. $f_{\pi }$ and $m_{\pi }$ change by no more than 10\% for $T<0.7T_c$, however, as $T\to T_c$, thermal fluctuations cause the pion bound state contribution to the four-point quark-antiquark correlation function to disappear.

Comments: 10 pages (incl. 2 figures), RevTeX