Chiral symmetry restoration at finite temperature in the planar limit

We investigate numerically chiral symmetry restoration at finite temperature in the planar limit in the deconfined phase, both when it is stable and when the system is supercooled. We find chiral symmetry restoration at T-X = T-d, where T-d is the temperature of the deconfinement transition in pure gauge theory and T-X < T-d in the supercooled deconfined phase. In the stable case the spectrum of the Dirac operator opens a gap in a discontinuous manner and in the supercooled phase the gap seems to vanish continuously. (c) 2006 Published by Elsevier B.V.