Deconfinement through chiral symmetry restoration in two-flavour QCD

Abstract.

We propose that in QCD with dynamical quarks, colour deconfinement occurs when an external field induced by the chiral condensate strongly aligns the Polyakov loop. This effect sets in at the chiral symmetry restoration temperature $T_{\chi}$ and thus makes deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration coincide. The predicted singular behaviour of Polyakov loop susceptibilities at $T_{\chi}$ is shown to be supported by finite temperature lattice calculations.