Quark confinement and deconfinement in QCD from the viewpoint of Abelian-projected effective gauge theory

We give another derivation of quark confinement in QCD from the viewpoint of the low-energy effective Abelian gauge theory of QCD obtained via Abelian projection. It is based on the recently discovered Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition in the four-dimensional Abelian gauge theory. Moreover, we show that there exists a critical gauge coupling constant in QCD, above which confinement set in and below which there is no confinement. In a SU(N) gauge theory with Nf flavored fermions, we argue that this leads to a critical value of fermion flavors Nfc for the confinement as well as the chiral symmetry breaking, which separates the deconfining and chiral symmetric phase from the confining and chiral symmetry breaking phase. A finite-temperature deconfinement transition is also discussed briefly.