In preparation of lattice studies of the two-color QCD phase diagram we study chiral restoration and deconfinement at finite temperature with two flavors of staggered quarks using an RHMC algorithm on GPUs. We first study unquenching effects in local
Polyakov loop distributions, and the Polyakov loop potential obtained via Legendre transformation, in a fixed-scale approach for heavier quarks. We also present the chiral condensate and the corresponding susceptibility over the lattice coupling across the chiral transition for lighter quarks. Using Ferrenberg-Swendsen reweighting we extract the maxima of the chiral susceptibility in order to determine pseudo-critical couplings on various lattices suitable for chiral extrapolations. These are then used to fix the relation between coupling and temperature in the chiral limit.
We present results on the QCD equation of state, obtained with two different improved dynamical staggered fermion actions and almost physical quark masses. Lattice cut-off effects are discussed in detail as results for three different lattice spacing
s are available now, i.e. results have been obtained on lattices with temporal extent of $N_tau=4,6$ and 8. Furthermore we discuss the Taylor expansion approach to non-zero baryon chemical potential by means of an expansion of the pressure. We use the expansion coefficients to calculate various fluctuations and correlations among hadronic charges. We find that the correlations reproduce the qualitative behavior of the resonance gas model below $T_c$ and start to agree with the free gas predictions for $Tgsim 1.5T_c$.
