  We study the relation of confinement and chiral symmetry breaking in gauge
theories with non-trivial center, such as SU(N) gauge theories. To this end, we
deform these gauge theories by introducing an additional control parameter into
the theory and by varying the representation of the quark fields. We then
consider a large-d(R) expansion of the effective action, where d(R) denotes the
dimension of the representation R of the quark fields. We show how our
large-d(R) expansion can be extended in a systematic fashion and discuss the
effects of 1/d(R)-corrections on the dynamics close to the finite-temperature
phase boundary. Our analysis of the fixed-point structure of the theory
suggests that the order, in which the chiral and the deconfinement phase
transition occur, is dictated by the representation of the quark fields and by
the underlying gauge group. In particular, we find that the phase diagram in
the plane spanned by the temperature and our additional control parameter
exhibits an intriguing phase structure for quarks in the fundamental
representation. For SU(N) gauge theories with adjoint quarks, on the other
hand, the structure of this phase diagram appears to be less rich, at least in
leading order in the 1/d(R)-expansion.
