Quark Mass and the QCD Transition

Abstract

We discuss different aspects of the quark mass dependence of the chiral and deconfinement transitions. We make predictions for locating the deconfining critical point, by analyzing the $m_q$ dependence of the ratio of imaginary and real mass of the Polyakov loop. We then present an effective theory that allows the extraction of coupling constants from available lattice data for the temperature dependence of the chiral and Polyakov loop condensates at different quark masses.