Chiral Symmetry Restoration at Finite Temperature and Chemical Potential in the Improved Ladder Approximation

The chiral symmetry of QCD is studied at finite temperature and chemical potential using the Schwinger-Dyson equation in the improved ladder approximation. We calculate three order parameters; the vacuum expectation value of the quark bilinear operator, the pion decay constant and the quark mass gap. We have a second order phase transition at the temperature Tc = 169 MeV along the zero chemical potential line, and a first order phase transition at the chemical potential μc = 598 MeV along the zero temperature line. We also calculate the critical exponents of the three order parameters.