The QCD Phase Transition in Strong Magnetic Fields

We investigate the properties of the deconfining∕chiral restoring transition for two flavor QCD in presence of a uniform background magnetic field. We adopt a standard staggered discretization of the fermion action, different values of the bare quark mass corresponding to mπ ranging from 200 to 500 MeV, and magnetic fields up to eB 1 GeV2. We present first results regarding the dependence of the deconfinement and chiral transition temperature and strength on the magnetic field