Finite temperature QCD in the quark-composites approach

Abstract

We investigate QCD at finite temperature in the quark composites approach, which is based on the use of quark composites with hadronic quantum numbers as fundamental variables. We find that chiral symmetry restoration and quark deconfinement are one and the same first order phase transition, whose critical temperature, in a one loop approximation, is $T= 2\sqrt{\Omega} \rho^{-2}m_{\pi}$, where $m_{\pi}$ is the pion mass, $\Omega=24$ the number of up and down quark components, and $\rho$ a parameter of order 1 whose precise value can be determined by the study of the pion-pion interaction.