NATURE OF THE THERMAL PHASE-TRANSITION WITH WILSON QUARKS

We describe a series of simulations of high temperature QCD with two f lavors of Wilson quarks aimed at clarifying the nature of the high tem perature phase found in current simulations. Most of our work is with four time slices, although we include some runs with six and eight tim e slices for comparison. In addition to the usual themodynamic observa bles, we study the quark mass defined by the divergence of the axial v ector current and the quark propagator in the Landau gauge. We find th at the sharpness of the N(T) = 4 thermal transition has a maximum arou nd kappa=0.19 and 6/g2 = 4.8.