Deconfinement Phase Transition and the Quark Condensate

We study the dual quark condensate as a signal for the confinement-deconfinement phase transition of QCD. This order parameter for center symmetry has been defined recently by Bilgici et al. within the framework of lattice QCD. In this work we determine the ordinary and the dual quark condensate with functional methods using a formulation of the Dyson-Schwinger equations for the quark propagator on a torus. The temperature dependence of these condensates serves to investigate the interplay between the chiral and deconfinement transitions of quenched QCD.