Chiral condensate in the deconfined phase of quenched gauge theories

We compute the low-lying spectrum of the overlap Dirac operator in the deconfined phase of finite-temperature quenched gauge theory. It suggests the existence of a chiral condensate which we confirm with a direct stochastic estimate. We show that the part of the spectrum responsible for the chiral condensate can be understood as arising from a dilute gas of instantons and anti-instantons. (c) 2000 The American Physical Society.