Chiral and deconfinement transitions in strong coupling lattice QCD with finite coupling and Polyakov loop effects

Abstract: We investigate chiral and deconfinement transitions in the framework of the strong coupling lattice QCD for color SU(3) with one species of unrooted staggered fermion at finite temperature and quark chemical potential. We take account of the leading order Polyakov loop terms as well as the next-to-next-to-leading order (1/g^4) fermionic terms of the strong coupling expansion in the effective action. We investigate the Polyakov loop effects by comparing two approximation schemes, a Haar measure method (no fluctuation from the mean field) and a Weiss mean-field method (with fluctuations). The effective potential is obtained in both cases, and we analytically clarify the Polyakov loop contributions to the effective potential. The Polyakov loop is found to suppress the chiral condensate and to reduce the chiral transition temperature at mu=0, and the chiral transition temperature roughly reproduces the Monte Carlo results at beta=2N_c/g^2 \lesssim 4. The deconfinement transition is found to be the crossover and first order for light (am_0 \lesssim 4 at beta=4) and heavy quark masses, respectively.