We investigate the properties of the deconfining/chiral restoring transition for two flavor QCD in the presence of a uniform background magnetic field. We adopt standard staggered fermions and a lattice spacing of the order of 0.3 fm. We explore different values of the bare quark mass, corresponding to pion masses in the range 200–480 MeV, and magnetic fields up to $|e|B\sim 0.75{\mathrm{GeV}}^2$. The deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration temperatures remain compatible with each other and rise very slightly ($<2\%$ for our largest magnetic field) as a function of the magnetic field. On the other hand, the transition seems to become sharper as the magnetic field increases.

• Received 15 July 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.82.051501