PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

We report on the first steps of an ongoing project to add gauge observablesand gauge corrections to the well-studied strong coupling limit of staggeredlattice QCD, which has been shown earlier to be amenable to numericalsimulations by the worm algorithm in the chiral limit and at finite density.Here we show how to evaluate the expectation value of the Polyakov loop in theframework of the strong coupling limit at finite temperature, allowing to studyconfinement properties along with those of chiral symmetry breaking. We findthe Polyakov loop to rise smoothly, thus signalling deconfinement. Thenon-analytic nature of the chiral phase transition is reflected in thederivative of the Polyakov loop. We also discuss how to construct an effectivetheory for non-zero lattice coupling, which is valid to $O(\beta)$.