One of the fundamental questions in finite temperature QCD is the
relation between deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration.
Lattice simulations indicate that for QCD with quarks in the
fundamental representation chiral symmetry breaking and
confinement occur at the same critical temperature. When quarks
are in the adjoint representation these two transitions seem to
happen independently of each other. Furthermore, lattice results
for 3 flavors of quarks indicate the sharpening of the chiral
crossover and the flattening in the rise of the renormalized
Polyakov loop as quark masses are reduced.
Recently, we studied generic properties of phase transitions by
analyzing the critical behavior of non-order parameter fields. We
have identified an efficient information transfer from the light
order parameter to the heavy, non-critical fields. Following these
ideas and results we constructed an effective Lagrangian which
illustrates why color deconfines when chiral symmetry is restored
in hot gauge theories with quarks in the fundamental
representation. For quarks in the adjoint representation we show
that while deconfinement and the chiral transition do not need to
coincide, entanglement between them is still present. We further
discuss the effect of quark masses on these transitions for
different flavors of quarks.