PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

We provide evidence for the influence of thermal fluctuations of Goldstone modes on the chiral condensate at finite temperature. We show that at fixed temperature, T < T-c, in the vicinity of the chiral transition temperature this leads to a characteristic dependence of the chiral condensate on the square root of the light quark mass (m(l)), which is expected for 3-dimensional models with broken O(N) symmetry. As a consequence the chiral susceptibility shows a strong quark mass dependence for all temperatures below T-c and diverges like 1/root m(l) in the chiral limit,.