We construct an effective model for the chiral field and the Polyakov loop in which we can investigate the interplay between the approximate chiral symmetry restoration and the deconfinement of color in a thermal SU(3) gauge theory with three flavors of massive quarks. The phenomenological couplings between these two sectors can then be related to the recent lattice data on the renormalized Polyakov loop and the chiral condensate close to the critical region.
Confinement; Chiral phase transition; Quark mass effects
