Linking the chiral and deconfinement phase transitions

Yoshitaka Hatta, Kenji Fukushima

Published 2003-07-04, updated 2004-04-19Version 2

We show that the electric glueball becomes critical at the end-point of the deconfinement phase transition in finite temperature QCD. Based on this observation and existing lattice data, we argue that the chiral phase transition at a zero quark mass and the deconfinement phase transition at an infinite quark mass are continuously connected by the glueball-sigma mixing.