Chiral and deconfinement phase transition in the Hamiltonian approach to QCD in Coulomb gauge

The chiral and deconfinement phase transitions are investigated within the variational Hamiltonian approach to QCD in Coulomb gauge. The temperature beta(-1) is introduced by compactifying a spatial dimension. Thereby the whole temperature dependence is encoded in the vacuum state on the spatial manifold R-2 x S-1 (beta). The chiral quark condensate and the dual quark condensate (dressed Polyakov loop) are calculated as a function of the temperature. From their inflection points the pseudocritical temperatures for the chiral and deconfinement crossover transitions are determined. Using the zero-temperature quark and gluon propagators obtained within the variational approach as input, we find 170 and 198 MeV, respectively, for the chiral and deconfinement transition.