On the Relation of the Deconfinement and the Chiral Phase Transition in Gauge Theories with Fundamental and Adjoint Matter

We study the relation of confinement and chiral symmetry breaking in gauge theories with non-trivial center, such as SU(N) gauge theories. To this end, we deform these gauge theories by introducing an additional control parameter into the theory and by varying the representation of the quark fields. We then consider a large-d(R) expansion of the effective action, where d(R) denotes the dimension of the representation R of the quark fields. We show how our large-d(R) expansion can be extended in a systematic fashion and discuss the effects of 1/d(R)-corrections on the dynamics close to the finite-temperature phase boundary. Our analysis of the fixed-point structure of the theory suggests that the order, in which the chiral and the deconfinement phase transition occur, is dictated by the representation of the quark fields and by the underlying gauge group. In particular, we find that the phase diagram in the plane spanned by the temperature and our additional control parameter exhibits an intriguing phase structure for quarks in the fundamental representation. For SU(N) gauge theories with adjoint quarks, on the other hand, the structure of this phase diagram appears to be less rich, at least in leading order in the 1/d(R)-expansion.