Characteristics of the chiral phase transition in nonlocal quark models

The characteristics of the chiral phase transition are analyzed within the framework of chiral quark models with nonlocal interactions in the mean field approximation. In the chiral limit, we develop a semi-analytic framework which allows us to explicitly determine the phase transition curve, the position of the critical points, some relevant critical exponents, etc. For the case of finite current quark masses, we show the behavior of various thermodynamical and chiral response functions across the phase transition.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures. Figures 1 and 2 modified, references added, minor changes in the presentation and in the discussion of results. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Transverse momentum dependence in the perturbative calculation of pion form factor

By reanalysing transverse momentum dependence in the perturbative calculation of pion form factor an improved expression of pion form factor which takes into account the transverse momentum dependenc in hard scattering amplitude and intrinsic transverse momentum dependence associated with pion wave functions is given to leading order, which is available for momentum transfers of the order of a few GeV as well as for $Q \to \infty$. Our scheme can be extended to evaluate the contributions to the pion form factor beyond leading order.Comment: 13 pages in LaTeX, plus 3 Postscript figure