CONTINUUM STUDY OF DECONFINEMENT AT FINITE-TEMPERATURE

Deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration are explored in a confin ing, renormalizable, Dyson-Schwinger equation model of two-flavor QCD. An order parameter for deconfinement is introduced and used to establ ish that, in the chiral limit, deconfinement and chiral symmetry resto ration are coincident at T-c approximate to 150 MeV. The transitions a re second order and each has the same critical exponent: beta approxim ate to 0.3. The deconfinement transition exhibits sensitivity to the c urrent-quark mass. f(pi) and m(pi) change by less than 10% for T < 0.7 T(c); however, as T --> T-c, thermal fluctuations cause the pion bound state contribution to the four-point quark-antiquark correlation func tion to disappear.