On the chiral and deconfinement phase transitions in parity-conserving at finite temperature

Abstract We present some results about the interplay between the chiral and deconfinement phase transitions in parity-conserving QED 3 (with N flavours of massless 4 component fermions) at finite temperature. Following Grignani et al. 11 , 12 , confinement is discussed in terms of an effective sine-Gordon (SG) theory for the timelike component of the gauge field A 0 . But whereas in 11 , 12 the fermion mass m is a Lagrangian parameter, we consider the m=0 case and ask whether an effective SG theory can again be derived with m replaced by the dynamically generated mass Σ which appears below T ch , the critical temperature for the chiral phase transition. The fermion and gauge sectors are strongly interdependent, but as a first approximation we decouple them by taking Σ to be a constant, depending only on the constant part A 0 of the gauge field. We argue that the existence of a low-temperature confining phase may be associated with the generation of Σ ; and that, analogously, the vanishing of Σ for T>T ch drives the system to its deconfining phase. The effect of the gauge field dynamics on mass generation is also indicated.