Hadron Properties just before Deconfinement

Abstract

We have investigated hadron screening masses, the chiral condensate, and the pion decay constant close to the deconfinement phase transition in the confined phase of QCD. The simulations were done in the quenched approximation, on a lattice of size \mbox{$32^{3}\times 8$}. We examined temperatures ranging from $0.75\tc$ up to $0.92\tc$. We see no sign of a temperature dependence in the chiral condensate or the meson properties, but some temperature dependence for the nucleon screening mass is not excluded.