Deconfinement and chiral phase transitions in quark matter with a strong electric field

The deconfinement and chiral phase transitions are studied in the context of the electrized quark matter at finite temperature in the two-flavor Polyakov–Nambu–Jona-Lasinio model. Using the mean field approximation and an electric field independent regularization we show that the effect of temperature and/or electric fields is to partially restore the chiral symmetry. The deconfinement phase transition is slightly affected by the magnitude of the electric field. To this end we show how the effective quark masses and the expectation value of the Polyakov loop are affected by the electric fields at finite temperatures. As a very interesting result, the pseudocritical temperatures for chiral symmetry restoration and deconfinement decrease as we increase the magnitude of the electric fields; however, both start to increase after some critical value of the electric field.