Thermodynamics of QCD at vanishing density

We study the phase structure of QCD at finite temperature within a Polyakoy-loop extended quark-meson model. Such a model describes the chiral as well as the confinement-deconfinement dynamics. In the present investigation, based on the approach and results put forward in [1-4], both matter and glue fluctuations are included. We present results for the order parameters as well as some thermodynamic observables and find very good agreement with recent results from lattice QCD. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license