According to the Narnhofer Thirring Theorem [1] interacting systems at finite temperature cannot be described by particles with a sharp dispersion law. It is therefore mandatory to develop new methods to extract particle masses at finite temperature. The Maximum Entropy method offers a path to obtain the spectral function of a particle correlation function directly. We have implemented the method and tested it with zero temperature ϒ correlation functions obtained from an NRQCD simulation. Results for different smearing functions are discussed.

We study the global symmetries of SU(2) gauge theory with N flavors of staggered fermions in the presence of a chemical potential. We motivate the special interest of the case N = 1 (staggered) with fermions in the adjoint representation of the gauge group. We present results from numerical simulations with both hybrid Monte Carlo and the Two-Step Multi-Bosonic algorithm.

It has been proposed, that the chiral continuum limit of 2-flavour QCD with Wilson fermions is brought about by a phase in which flavour and parity symmetry are broken spontaneously at finite lattice spacing. At finite temperature this phase should retract from the weak coupling limit to form 5 cusps. This scenario is studied with tree level Symanzik improved actions for both gauge and fermion fields on lattices of size $8^3\times 4$ and $12^2\times 24\times 4$.

We study the Landau gauge propagators of the lattice SU(2) 3d adjoint Higgs model, considered as an effective theory of high temperature 4d SU(2) gauge theory. From the long distance behaviour of the propagators we extract the screening masses. The propagators are studied both in the symmetric and the broken phases of the 3d Higgs model. It is shown that the pole masses extracted from the propagators in the symmetric phase agree well with the screening masses obtained recently in finite temperature SU(2) theory, while propagators measured in the broken phase show quite a different behaviour. This suggest that the symmetric phase of the 3d model corresponds to the deconfined phase of the 4d SU(2) gauge theory. The relation of the propagator masses to the masses extracted from gauge invariant correlators and the mass gap of pure 3d SU(2) gauge theory is also discussed.

We present first results of a study of two flavour QCD with Wilson fermions at finite temperature. We have used tree level Symanzik improvement in both the gauge and fermion part of the action. In a first step we explore the phase diagramm on an 83 × 4 lattice, with particular emphasis on checking Aoki's conjecture with an improved action.

The screening masses of hot SU(N) gauge theory, defined as poles of the corresponding propagators are studied in 3d adjoint Higgs model, considered as an effective theory of QCD, using coupled gap equations and lattice Monte-Carlo simulations (for N=2). Using so-called lambda gauges non-perturbative evidence for gauge independence of the pole masses within this class of gauges is given. A possible application of the screening masses for the resummation of the free energy is discussed.

Results on the phase transition in QCD with two flavours of light staggered fermions from an ongoing simulation are presented. We find the restoration of the chiral SU(2) x SU(2) symmetry, but not of the axial U_A(1) symmetry.