THE NATURE OF THE SOFT EXCITATION AT THE CRITICAL END POINT OF QCD

Using a large flavor number expansion and a gap equation for the pion mass the chiral quark-meson model is solved at the lowest order in the fermion contributions. In the chiral limit the tricritical point (TCP) is determined analytically. The softening of the sigma particle is verified at this point and is further investigated for a physical pion mass in the neighbourhood of the critical endpoint (CEP).