Chiral Phase Transition in QCD and Vector Manifestation

Spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking is one of the most important features in low-energy QCD. The chiral symmetry is expected to be restored at very high temperature and/or density. Accompanied by the chiral phase transition, properties of hadrons will be changed especially near the critical point. The study of the phenomena associated with the chiral phase transition will give us some clues on the connection between the chiral symmetry and the low-energy hadron dynamics. We develop the theory based on the hidden local symmetry (HLS) at finite temperature, which is an effective field theory of QCD and includes pions and vector mesons as the dynamical degrees of freedom, and study the chiral phase transition in hot matter. We show that the chiral symmetry is restored as the vector manifestation (VM), in which the massless degenerate pion (and its flavor partners) and the longitudinal $\rho$ meson (and its flavor partners) as the chiral partner. We also present several predictions based on the VM. We estimate the critical temperature $T_c$ and show the following phenomena near $T_c$: the vector charge susceptibility becomes equal to the axial-vector charge susceptibility; the vector dominance of the electromagnetic form factor of the pion is largely violated; the pion velocity is close to the speed of light. Furthermore, we show that the remnant of the VM can be clearly seen in the system of heavy mesons. We expect that the VM and its predictions are testable by current and future experiments and the lattice analysis.