Center Symmetry and its Breaking at the QCD High Temperature Transition
Prof. Christof Gattringer (Universität Graz)

We discuss the role of center symmetry in QCD. We use the Polyakov loop which describes a static quark, as well as canonical fermion determinants which describe QCD with a fixed quark number to illustrate the manifestation of this symmetry and its breaking at high temperatures. Subsequently we discuss lattice results that indicate the existence of local spatial clusters with coherent center phases. The deconfinement transition manifests itself as a percolation phenomenon where one of the phases starts to dominate and an infinite cluster forms.