arXiv2014
In connection with massless two-flavour QCD, we analyse the chiral symmetry restoring phase transition using three distinct gluon-quark vertices and two different assumptions about the long-range part of the quark-quark interaction. In each case, we solve the gap equation, locate the transition temperature T_c, and use the maximum entropy method to extract the dressed-quark spectral function at T>T_c. Our best estimate for the chiral transition temperature is T_c=(147 +/- 8)MeV; and the deconfinement transition is coincident. For temperatures markedly above T_c, we find a spectral density that is consistent with those produced using a hard thermal loop expansion, exhibiting both a normal and plasmino mode. On a domain T\in[T_c,T_s], with T_s approximately 1.5T_c, however, with each of the six kernels we considered, the spectral function contains a significant additional feature. Namely, it displays a third peak, associated with a zero mode, which is essentially nonperturbative in origin and dominates the spectral function at T=T_c. We suggest that the existence of this mode is a signal for the formation of a strongly-coupled quark-gluon plasma and that this strongly-interacting state of matter is likely a distinctive feature of the QCD phase transition.