Continuum Study of Deconfinement at Finite Temperature

Deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration are explored in a confining, renormalizable, Dyson-Schwinger equation model of two-flavor 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 $T_c\approx 150\mathrm{MeV}$. The transitions are second order and each has the same critical exponent: $\beta \approx 0.3$. The deconfinement transition exhibits sensitivity to the current-quark mass. $f_{\pi }$ and $m_{\pi }$ change by less than 10% for $T<\mathrm{}{0.7T}_c$; however, as $T\to T_c$, thermal fluctuations cause the pion bound state contribution to the four-point quark-antiquark correlation function to disappear.