PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

We consider the pseudocritical temperatures for the chiral and deconfinement transitions within a Polyakov-loop Dyson-Schwinger equation approach which employs a nonlocal rank-2 separable model for the effective gluon propagator. These pseudocritical temperatures differ by a factor of 2 when the quark and gluon sectors are considered separately, but get synchronized and become coincident when their coupling is switched on. The coupling of the Polyakov loop to the chiral quark dynamics narrows the temperature region of the QCD transition in which chiral symmetry and deconfinement is established. We investigate the effect of rescaling the parameter T(0) in the Polyakov-loop potential on the QCD transition for both the logarithmic and polynomial forms of the potential. While the critical temperatures vary in a similar way, the width of the transition is more strongly affected for the logarithmic potential. For this potential, the character of the transition changes from crossover to a first-order one when T(0) < 210 MeV, but it remains crossover in the whole range of relevant T(0) values for the polynomial form.