• Casimir scaling
• chiral condensate
• Polyakov loop
• QGP
• quark gluon plasma
• gluon
• quark
• Columbia plot
• monopole current
• pseudocritical temperature
• monopoles
• thermal monopoles
• abelian projection
• QCD
• quantum chromodynamics
• pion
• lattice QCD
• LCP
• lines of constant physics
• Bose-Einstein condensation
• BEC
• condensation temperature
• monopole condensation
• confinement
• deconfinement
• crossover

Quarks are confined within hadrons and have never been detected as free particles. This is the color confinement phenomenon, whose analytical explanation is still lacking and we must rely on lattice QCD simulations. A proposed mechanism of confinement is dual superconductivity, where the QCD vacuum is expected to be populated by a condensate of chromo-magnetic charges. These have been identified with U(1) Abelian monopoles emerging from an Abelian projection, such as the Maximal Abelian gauge (MAG). For Yang-Mills theories, the condensation temperature of monopoles Tbec coincides with the confinement temperature. In full QCD Tbec is almost twice the pseudocritical temperature (Tc=155MeV) of chiral symmetry breaking, largely believed to be the temperature of confinement. This result may be explained as the existence of a still confined intermediate phase of QCD between Tc and 2Tc. But even if Tc is actually the confinement temperature, the system begins to be compatible with a weakly interacting Quark-Gluon plasma (QGP) around T=300MeV, i.e. surprisingly near Tbec. Hence the evaporation of monopoles from the GS condensate perhaps explains the QGP formation. In this thesis we study monopole condensation for different non-physical quark masses, to see how quark dynamics affects Tbec. This gave us also the chance to gain further hints on the possible connection between monopoles and QGP, through a simplified analysis of the Casimir scaling deviations of the Polyakov loop.