Chiral and deconfinement transitions in strong coupling lattice QCD

Abstract: We investigate the QCD phase diagram based on the strong coupling expansion of the lattice QCD with one species of the staggered fermions at finite temperature (T) and chemical potential (mu). We analytically derive an effective potential including both chiral and deconfinement (Z_3) dynamics with finite coupling effects in mean-field approximations. We focus on Polyakov loop properties in whole T-mu plane, and study relations between the chiral and deconfinement crossovers. At a fixed large mu, sequencial rapid variations of the Polyakov loop are observed with increasing T. It is natural to interprete them as the "chiral induced" and "Z_3 induced" deconfinement crossovers.