Chicken or the egg; or who ordered the chiral phase transition? art. no. 116007

We draw an analogy between the deconfining transition in the (2+1)-dimensio nal Georgi-Glashow model and the chiral phase transition in (3+1)-dimension al QCD. Based on the detailed analysis of the former we suggest that the ch iral symmetry restoration in QCD at high temperature is driven by the therm al ensemble of baryons and antibaryons. The chiral symmetry is restored whe n roughly half of the volume is occupied by the baryons. Surprisingly enoug h, even though baryons are rather heavy, a crude estimate for the critical temperature gives T-c=180 MeV. In this scenario the binding of the instanto ns is not the cause but rather a consequence of the chiral symmetry restora tion.