Origin and consequences of a weak deconfining transition in QCD

The weakly first order nature of the deconfinement transition in pure finite temperature QCD can be understood using a blend of computer simulation and analytic techniques. Monte Carlo simulation of pure QCD shows that the effective action for Polyakov loops has a negative adjoint coupling, as expected from renormalization group arguments. The negative adjoint coupling in turn softens the phase transition, in turn effecting all nonuniversal critical behavior.