  In-medium chiral symmetry breaking in confining potential models of QCD is
examined. Past attempts to analyse these models have been hampered by infrared
divergences that appear at non-zero temperature. We argue that previous
attempts to circumvent this problem are not satisfactory and demonstrate a
simple resolution. We also show that the expectation that confining models do
not exhibit a chiral phase transition is incorrect. The effect of summing ring
diagrams is investigated and we present the first determination of the
temperature-density phase diagram for two model systems. We find that
observables and the phase structure of the confinement models depend strongly
on whether quark polarisation is accounted for. Finally, it appears that
standard confinement models cannot adequately describe both hadron
phenomenology and in-medium properties of QCD.
