Chiral symmetry restoration and the Z3 sectors of QCD -: art. no. 054502

Quenched QCD has a Z(3) phase transition which is explicitly broken for dynamical calculations. Knowing whether or not the chiral phase transition occurs at the same temperature for all Z(3) sectors and whether this critical temperature coincides with the deconfinement transition could be crucial to understand the underlying microscopic dynamics also for the full theory. We use the existence of a gap in the Dirac spectrum as an order parameter for the restoration of chiral symmetry. We find that the spectral gap opens up at the same critical temperature in all Z(3) sectors in contrast with earlier claims in the literature.