On the nature of thermal QCD phase transitions

Abstract

We argue that the chiral phase transition and the deconfinement phase transition in finite temperature QCD are just different limits of a single crossover phase transition driven by the lightest scalar field which is a mixture of the glueball and the sigma meson. The key mechanism, the level repulsion between the sigma and the glueball, gives not only a unified description of the finite temperature phase transitions, but also a consistent characterization of the entire QCD phase diagram in the temperature-quark mass plane.