HADRON PROPERTIES JUST BEFORE DECONFINEMENT

We have investigated hadron screening masses, the chiral condensate, a nd the pion decay constant close to the deconfinement phase transition in the confined phase of QCD. The simulations were done in the quench ed approximation, on a lattice of size 32(3) x 8. We examined temperat ures ranging from 0.75T(c) up to 0.92T(c). We see no sign of a tempera ture dependence in the chiral condensate or the meson properties, but some temperature dependence for the nucleon screening mass is not excl uded.