Continuum Study of Deconfinement at Finite Temperature.

Deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration are explored in a confining, renormalisable, Dyson-Schwinger equation model of two-flavour 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 Tc ≈ 150MeV. The transitions are second order and each has the same critical exponent: β ≈ 0.3. The deconfinement transition is found to exhibit sensitivity to the current-quark mass. fπ and mπ change by no more than 10% for T < 0.7Tc, however, as T → Tc, thermal fluctuations cause the pion bound state contribution to the four-point quark-antiquark correlation function to disappear. Pacs Numbers: 11.10.Wx, 12.38.Aw, 11.30.Rd, 24.85.+p, 11.15.Tk Typeset using REVTEX