We test the recent claim that supersymmetric matrix quantum mechanics with mass deformation preserving maximal supersymmetry can be used to study N=4 super Yang-Mills theory on RxS^3 in the planar limit. When the mass parameter is large, we can integrate out all the massive fluctuations around a particular classical solution, which corresponds to RxS^3. The resulting effective theory for the gauge field moduli at finite temperature is studied both analytically and numerically, and shown to reproduce the deconfinement phase transition in N=4 super Yang-Mills theory on RxS^3 at weak coupling. This transition was speculated to be a continuation of the conjectured phase transition at strong coupling, which corresponds to the Hawking-Page transition based on the gauge-gravity duality. By choosing a different classical solution of the same model, one can also reproduce results for gauge theories on other space-time such as RxS^3/Z_q and RxS^2. All these theories can be studied at strong coupling by the new simulation method, which was used successfully for supersymmetric matrix quantum mechanics without mass deformation.
Recently a novel large-N reduction has been proposed as a maximally supersymmetric regularization of N=4 super Yang-Mills theory on RxS^3 in the planar limit. This proposal, if it works, will enable us to study the theory non-perturbatively on a computer, and hence to test the AdS/CFT correspondence analogously to the recent works on the D0-brane system. We provide a nontrivial check of this proposal by performing explicit calculations in the large-N reduced model, which is nothing but the so-called plane wave matrix model, around a particular stable vacuum corresponding to RxS^3. At finite te…
We investigate BPS solutions in ABJM theory on RxS^2. We find new BPS solutions, which have nonzero angular momentum as well as nontrivial configurations of fluxes. Applying the "Higgsing procedure" of arxiv:0803.3218 around a 1/2-BPS solution of ABJM theory, one obtains N=8 super Yang-Mills (SYM) on RxS^2. We also show that other BPS solutions of the SYM can be obtained from BPS solutions of ABJM theory by this higgsing procedure.
We study the thermodynamics of U(N) N=4 Super Yang-Mills (SYM) on RxS^3 with non-zero chemical potentials for the SU(4) R-symmetry. We find that when we are near a point with zero temperature and critical chemical potential, N=4 SYM on RxS^3 reduces to a quantum mechanical theory. We identify three such critical regions giving rise to three different quantum mechanical theories. Two of them have a Hilbert space given by the SU(2) and SU(2|3) sectors of N=4 SYM of recent interest in the study of integrability, while the third one is the half-BPS sector dual to bubbling AdS geometries. In the pl…
Recently a mass deformation of the maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills quantum mechanics has been constructed from the supermembrane action in eleven dimensional plane-wave backgrounds. However, the origin of this plane-wave matrix theory in terms of a compactification of a higher dimensional Super Yang-Mills model has remained obscure. In this paper we study the Kaluza-Klein reduction of D=4, N=4 Super Yang-Mills theory on a round three-sphere, and demonstrate that the plane-wave matrix theory arises through a consistent truncation to the lowest lying modes. We further explore the relation be…
We show that little string theory on S^5 can be obtained as double-scaling limits of the maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories on RxS^2 and RxS^3/Z_k. By matching the gauge theory parameters with those in the gravity duals found by Lin and Maldacena, we determine the limits in the gauge theories that correspond to decoupling of NS5-brane degrees of freedom. We find that for the theory on RxS^2, the 't Hooft coupling must be scaled like ln^3(N), and on RxS^3/Z_k, like ln^2(N). Accordingly, taking these limits in these field theories gives Lagrangian definitions of little string theory on…
Maximal 't Hooft loops are studied in SO(3) lattice gauge theory at finite temperature T. Tunneling barriers among twist sectors causing loss of ergodicity for local update algorithms are overcome through parallel tempering, enabling us to measure the vortex free energy F and to identify a deconfinement transition at some $β_A^{crit}$. The behavior of F below $β_A^{crit}$ shows however striking differences with what is expected from discretizations in the fundamental representation.
In this paper, we study the theories with SU(2|4) symmetry which consist of the plane wave matrix model (PWMM), super Yang-Mills theory (SYM) on RxS^2 and SYM on RxS^3/Z_k. The last two theories can be realized as theories around particular vacua in PWMM, through the commutative limit of fuzzy sphere and Taylor's T-duality. We apply the localization method to PWMM to reduce the partition function and the expectation values of a class of supersymmetric operators to matrix integrals. By taking the commutative limit and performing the T-duality, we also obtain the matrix integrals for SYM on RxS^…
The center vortex model for the infrared sector of Yang-Mills theory, previously studied for the SU(2) gauge group, is extended to SU(3). This model is based on the assumption that vortex world-surfaces can be viewed as random surfaces in Euclidean space-time. The confining properties are investigated, with a particular emphasis on the finite-temperature deconfining phase transition. The model predicts a very weak first order transition, in agreement with SU(3) lattice Yang-Mills theory, and also reproduces a consistent behavior of the spatial string tension in the deconfined phase. The geomet…
We determine the theta dependence of the deconfinement temperature of SU(3) pure gauge theory, finding that it decreases in presence of a topological theta term. We do that by performing lattice simulations at imaginary theta, then exploiting analytic continuation. We also give an estimate of such dependence in the limit of a large number of colors N, and compare it with our numerical results.
The Polyakov loop variable serves as an order parameter to characterize the confined and deconfined phases of Yang-Mills theory. By integrating out the vector fields in the SU(2) Yang-Mills partition function in one-loop approximation, an effective action is obtained for the Polyakov loop to second order in a derivative expansion. The resulting effective potential for the Polyakov loop is capable of describing a second-order deconfinement transition as a function of temperature.
Some time ago, Svetitsky and Yaffe have argued that -- if the deconfinement phase transition of a (d+1)-dimensional Yang-Mills theory with gauge group G is second order -- it should be in the universality class of a d-dimensional spin model symmetric under the center of G. For d=3 these arguments have been confirmed numerically only in the SU(2) case with center Z(2), simply because all SU(N) Yang-Mills theories with N>=3 seem to have non-universal first order phase transitions. The symplectic groups Sp(N) also have the center Z(2) and provide another extension of SU(2) = Sp(1) to general N. U…
We give an analytical derivation of the confinement/deconfinement phase transition at finite temperature in the $SU(N)$ Yang-Mills theory in the $D$-dimensional space time for $D>2$. For this purpose, we use a novel reformulation of the Yang-Mills theory which allows the gauge-invariant gluonic mass term, and calculate analytically the effective potential of the Polyakov loop average concretely for the $SU(2)$ and $SU(3)$ Yang-Mills theories by including the gauge-invariant dynamical gluonic mass $M$. For $D=4$, we give an estimate on the transition temperature $T_d$ as the ratio $T_d/M$ to th…
The deconfinement phase transition of SU(2) Yang--Mills theory is investigated in the Hamiltonian approach in Coulomb gauge assuming a quasi-particle picture for the grand canonical gluon ensemble. The thermal equilibrium state is found by minimizing the free energy with respect to the quasi-gluon energy. Above the deconfinement phase transition the ghost form factor remains infrared divergent but its infrared exponent is approximately halved, while the gluon energy, being infrared divergent in the confined phase, becomes infrared finite in the deconfined phase. For the effective gluon mass we…
We investigate the deconfinement transition of static quarks in SU(N) Yang-Mills theories using a perturbative approach based on a massive extension of the Landau-DeWitt gauge-fixed action, where the gluon mass term is related to the issue of Gribov ambiguities. A leading-order, one-loop calculation of the effective potential for the Polyakov loop produces a deconfinement transition of second order for the SU(2) theory and of first order for SU(3) with transition temperatures in qualitative agreement with known values. We also report on the results of a two-loop calculation of the critical tem…
A model for the infrared sector of Yang-Mills theory based on magnetic vortices represented by (closed) random surfaces is investigated using lattice Monte Carlo methods. The random surfaces are governed by a surface area action and a curvature action. The model generates a finite-temperature deconfinement transition; the coupling constants of the model can be chosen such as to reproduce the SU(2) Yang-Mills ratio of the deconfinement temperature to the square root of the zero-temperature string tension, T_c / sqrt{sigma_0} =0.69. This yields a physical trajectory in the space of coupling cons…
The deconfinement phase transition of SU(2) Yang-Mills theory is investigated in the Hamiltonian approach in Coulomb gauge assuming a quasi-particle picture for the grand canonical gluon ensemble. The thermal equilibrium state is found by minimizing the free energy with respect to the quasi-gluon energy. At the deconfinement phase transition the gluon energy, being infrared divergent in the confined phase, becomes infrared finite in the deconfined phase, while the ghost form factor remains infrared divergent in the deconfined phase but its infrared exponent is approximately halved. Using the l…
We give an analytic demonstration that the 3+1 dimensional large N SU(N) pure Yang-Mills theory, compactified on a small 3-sphere so that the coupling constant at the compactification scale is very small, has a first order deconfinement transition as a function of temperature. We do this by explicitly computing the relevant terms in the canonical partition function up to 3-loop order; this is necessary because the leading (1-loop) result for the phase transition is precisely on the borderline between a first order and a second order transition. Since numerical work strongly suggests that the i…
We study the thermodynamics of large N pure 2+1 dimensional Yang-Mills theory on a small spatial sphere. By studying the effective action for the Polyakov loop order parameter, we show analytically that the theory has a second order deconfinement transition to a phase where the eigenvalue distribution of the Polyakov loop is non-uniform but still spread over the whole unit circle. At a higher temperature, the eigenvalue distribution develops a gap, via an additional third-order phase transition. We discuss possible forms of the full phase diagram as a function of temperature and sphere radius.…
We introduce field theory techniques through which the deconfinement transition of four-dimensional Yang-Mills theory can be moved to a semi-classical domain where it becomes calculable using two-dimensional field theory. We achieve this through a double- trace deformation of toroidally compactified Yang-Mills theory on R2 \times S1_L \times S1_β. At large N, fixed-L, and arbitrary β, the thermodynamics of the deformed theory is equivalent to that of ordinary Yang-Mills theory at leading order in the large N expansion. At fixed-N, small L and a range of β, the deformed theory maps to a two-dim…
The Z(N) center symmetry plays an important role in the deconfinement phase transition of SU(N) Yang-Mills theory at finite temperature. The exceptional group G(2) is the smallest simply connected gauge group with a trivial center. Hence, there is no symmetry reason why the low- and high-temperature regimes in G(2) Yang-Mills theory should be separated by a phase transition. Still, we present numerical evidence for the presence of a first order deconfinement phase transition at finite temperature. Via the Higgs mechanism, G(2) breaks to its SU(3) subgroup when a scalar field in the fundamental…
It has recently been proposed that the entanglement entropy can be an order parameter of confinement/deconfinement transitions. To find a clear evidence, we introduce a new quantity called the geometric entropy, which is related to the entanglement entropy via a double Wick rotation. We analyze the geometric entropy and manifestly show that its value becomes discontinuous at the Hagedorn temperature both in the free N =4 super Yang-Mills and in its supergravity dual.
We study the phase structure of N=1 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory on R^3XS^1, with massive gauginos, periodic around the S^1, with Sp(2N) (N>=2), Spin(N) (N>=5), G_2, F_4, E_6, E_7, E_8 gauge groups. As the gaugino mass m is increased, with S^1 size and strong coupling scale fixed, we find a first-order phase transition both for theories with and without a center. This semiclassically calculable transition is driven, as in SU(N) and G_2, arxiv.org/abs/1205.0290 and arxiv.org/abs/1212.1238, by a competition between monopole-instantons and exotic topological "molecules"---"neutral" or "magnet…
We propose a nonperturbative definition of N=4 super Yang-Mills (SYM). We realize N=4 SYM on RxS^3 as the theory around a vacuum of the plane wave matrix model. Our regularization preserves sixteen supersymmetries and the gauge symmetry. We perform the 1-loop calculation to give evidences that the superconformal symmetry is restored in the continuum limit.
Recent results obtained for the deconfinement phase transition within the Hamiltonian approach to Yang-Mills theory are reviewed. Assuming a quasiparticle picture for the grand canonical gluon ensemble the thermal equilibrium state is found by minimizing the free energy with respect to the quasi-gluon energy. The deconfinement phase transition is accompanied by a drastic change of the infrared exponents of the ghost and gluon propagators. Above the phase transition the ghost form factor remains infrared divergent but its infrared exponent is approximately halved. The gluon energy being infrare…
A simple variational argument based on the Gaussian Effective Potential (GEP) is put forward to give evidence for mass generation and deconfinement in pure Yang-Mills SU(N) theory. The GEP analysis shows that the massless gaussian vacuum of Yang-Mills theory is perturbatively unstable towards a massive gaussian vacuum, indicating that a massive expansion is the natural choice for computations in YMT. At finite temperature, the GEP provides an optimal temperature-dependent mass parameter for the expansion and signals the occurrence of a weakly first-order phase transition at $T_{c}\approx$ 255 …
We compare different Polyakov loop actions yielding effective descriptions of finite-temperature SU(2) Yang-Mills theory on the lattice. The actions are motivated by a simultaneous strong-coupling and character expansion obeying center symmetry and include both Ising and Ginzburg-Landau type models. To keep things simple we limit ourselves to nearest-neighbor interactions. Some truncations involving the most relevant characters are studied within a novel mean-field approximation. Using inverse Monte-Carlo techniques based on exact geometrical Schwinger-Dyson equations we determine the effectiv…
The effective action for the Polyakov loop serving as an order parameter for deconfinement is obtained in one-loop approximation to second order in a derivative expansion. The calculation is performed in $d\geq 4$ dimensions, mostly referring to the gauge group SU(2). The resulting effective action is only capable of describing a deconfinement phase transition for $d>d_{\text{cr}}\simeq 7.42$. Since, particularly in $d=4$, the system is strongly governed by infrared effects, it is demonstrated that an additional infrared scale such as an effective gluon mass can change the physical properties …
A very simple variational approach to pure SU($N$) Yang-Mills theory is proposed, based on the Gaussian effective potential in a linear covariant gauge. The method provides an analytical variational argument for mass generation. The method can be improved order by order by a perturbative massive expansion around the optimal trial vacuum. At finite temperature, a weak first-order transition is found (at $T_c\approx 250$ MeV for $N=3$) where the mass scale drops discontinuously. Above the transition the optimal mass increases linearly as expected for deconfined bosons. The equation of state is f…
We discuss the deconfinement and the CP-breaking phase transitions at $θ=π$ in Yang-Mills theories. The 't Hooft anomaly matching prohibits the confined phase with CP symmetry and requires $T_{dec}(θ=π) \le T_{CP}$, where $T_{dec}(θ=π)$ and $T_{CP}$ denote the deconfinement and the CP-restoration temperatures, respectively, at $θ=π$. We analytically study these two phase transitions in softly-broken $\mathcal{N}=1$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories on small $\mathbb{R}^3\times S^1$ with the periodic boundary condition for gluinos. For most gauge groups except SU(2) in this model, we find that…
We study the gravity dual of four dimensional pure Yang-Mills theory through D4 branes, as proposed by Witten (holographic QCD). In this holographic QCD, it has been widely believed that the confinement phase in the pure Yang-Mills theory corresponds to the AdS D4 soliton in gravity and the deconfinement phase corresponds to the black D4 brane. We inspect this conjecture carefully and show that the correspondence between the black D4 brane and the deconfinement phase is not correct. Instead, by using a slightly different set up, we find an alternative gravity solution called "localized soliton…
We evaluate the longitudinal or (chromo-)electric Yang-Mills gluon propagator in the recently proposed center-symmetric Landau gauge at finite temperature [1]. To model the effect of the Gribov copies in the infrared, we use the Curci-Ferrari model which, in turn, allows us to rely on perturbative calculations. At one-loop order in the SU(2) case, the so-obtained longitudinal gluon propagator provides a clear signature for Z2 center-symmetry breaking with a singular behavior, characteristic of a continuous phase transition. This is in sharp contrast with what is found within the standard Landa…
We study the physics of quark deconfinement on domain walls in four-dimensional supersymmetric SU(N) Yang-Mills theory, compactified on a small circle with supersymmetric boundary conditions. We numerically examine the properties of BPS domain walls connecting vacua k units apart. We also determine their electric fluxes and use the results to show that Wilson loops of any nonzero N-ality exhibit perimeter law on all k-walls. Our results confirm and extend, to all N and k, the validity of the semiclassical picture of deconfinement of Anber, Sulejmanpasic and one of us (EP), arXiv:1501.06773, pr…
Basing on a semiclassical picture of dyons, we present a nonperturbative model of a pure Yang--Mills theory at any temperatures, for an arbitrary simple gauge group. We argue that at low temperatures dyons drive the Yang--Mills system for all groups to a phase where the `eigenphases' of the Polyakov line are, as a vector, proportional to the Weyl vector being the half sum of positive roots. For most gauge groups it means confinement, in particular for `quarks' in any N-ality nonzero representation of the SU(N) gauge group. At a critical temperature there is a 1st order phase transition for all…
We study a non-perturbative formulation of N=4 super Yang-Mills theory (SYM) on RxS^3 proposed in arXiv:0807.2352. This formulation is based on the large-N reduction, and the theory can be described as a particular large-N limit of the plane wave matrix model (PWMM), which is obtained by dimensionally reducing the original theory over S^3. In this paper, we perform some tests for this proposal. We construct an operator in the PWMM that corresponds to the Wilson loop in SYM in the continuum limit and calculate the vacuum expectation value of the operator for the case of the circular contour. We…
In a recent work we have proposed a perturbative approach for the study of the phase transition of pure Yang-Mills theories at finite temperature. This is based on a simple massive extension of background field methods in the Landau-DeWitt gauge, where the gluon mass term is related to the existence of Gribov ambiguities. We have shown that a one-loop calculation of the background field effective potential describes well the phase structure of the SU(2) and SU(3) theories. Here, we present the calculation of the next-to-leading-order contribution in perturbation theory for the SU(2) case. In p…
We study finite-temperature N=1 SU(2) super Yang-Mills theory, compactified on a spatial circle of size L with supersymmetric boundary conditions. In the semiclassical small-L regime, a deconfinement transition occurs at T_c <<1/L. The transition is due to a competition between non-perturbative topological "molecules"---magnetic and neutral bion-instantons---and electrically charged W-bosons and superpartners. Compared to deconfinement in non-supersymmetric QCD(adj) arXiv:1112.6389, the novelty is the relevance of the light modulus scalar field. It mediates interactions between neutral bions (…
We study the confinement-deconfinement phase transition of pure Yang-Mills theories at finite temperature using a simple massive extension of standard background field methods. We generalize our recent next-to-leading-order perturbative calculation of the Polyakov loop and of the related background field effective potential for the SU(2) theory to any compact and connex Lie group with a simple Lie algebra. We discuss in detail the SU(3) theory, where the two-loop corrections yield improved values for the first-order transition temperature as compared to the one-loop result. We also show that c…
We study numerically and analytically the behavior of classical Yang-Mills color fields in a random one-dimensional potential described by the Anderson model with disorder. Above a certain threshold the nonlinear interactions of Yang-Mills fields lead to chaos and deconfinement of color wavepackets with their subdiffusive spreading in space. The algebraic exponent of the second moment growth in time is found to be in a range of 0.3 to 0.4. Below the threshold color wavepackets remain confined even if a very slow spreading at very long times is not excluded due to subtle nonlinear effects and t…
We construct d<=7 dimensional maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories on a class of curved backgrounds with off-shell supercharges. The off-shell supersymmetry is mainly a generalization of on-shell supersymmetry constructed previously by Blau. We present several examples of backgrounds and discuss the number of the preserved supersymmetries on these backgrounds. We also construct another maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories on S^3 by dimensional reducing along the R-direction of N=4 super Yang-Mills theory on RxS^3.
Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院理论物理中心）；Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室）；Pacific Quantum Center, Far Eastern Federal University（远东联邦大学太平洋量子中心）；Institut Denis Poisson CNRS/UMR 7013, Université de Tours（图尔大学丹尼斯·泊松研究所（法国国家科学研究中心/联合研究单位7013））
We study the machine learning techniques applied to the lattice gauge theory's critical behavior, particularly to the confinement/deconfinement phase transition in the SU(2) and SU(3) gauge theories. We find that the neural network, trained on lattice configurations of gauge fields at an unphysical value of the lattice parameters as an input, builds up a gauge-invariant function, and finds correlations with the target observable that is valid in the physical region of the parameter space. In particular, if the algorithm aimed to predict the Polyakov loop as the deconfining order parameter, it …
We summarize and extend evidence that the deconfinement phase transition in Yang-Mills theories can be viewed as change of effective non-perturbative degrees of freedom and of symmetries of their interactions. In short, the strings in four dimensions (4d) at temperatures below the critical temperature Tc are replaced by particles, or field theories in 3d at T>Tc. The picture emerges within various approaches based, in particular, on dual models, lattice data and field theoretic models. We concentrate mostly on the lattice data, or on the language of quantum geometry.
We study the phase diagram of SU(2) Yang-Mills theory with one adjoint Weyl fermion on R^3xS^1 as a function of the fermion mass m and the compactification scale L. This theory reduces to thermal pure gauge theory as m->infinity and to circle-compactified (non-thermal) supersymmetric gluodynamics in the limit m->0. In the m-L plane, there is a line of center symmetry changing phase transitions. In the limit m->infinity, this transition takes place at L_c=1/T_c, where T_c is the critical temperature of the deconfinement transition in pure Yang-Mills theory. We show that near m=0, the critical c…
We compute the finite temperature ghost and gluon propagators of Yang-Mills theory in the Landau-DeWitt gauge. The background field that enters the definition of the latter is intimately related with the (gauge-invariant) Polyakov loop and serves as an equivalent order parameter for the deconfinement transition. We use an effective gauge-fixed description where the nonperturbative infrared dynamics of the theory is parametrized by a gluon mass which, as argued elsewhere, may originate from the Gribov ambiguity. In this scheme, one can perform consistent perturbative calculations down to infrar…
We study the behavior of center sectors in pure SU(4) lattice gauge theory at finite temperature. The center sectors are defined as spatial clusters of neighboring sites with values of their local Polyakov loops near the same center elements. We study the connectedness and percolation properties of the center clusters across the deconfinement transition. We show that for SU(4) gauge theory deconfinement cannot be described as a percolation transition of center clusters, a finding which is different from pure SU(2) or pure SU(3) Yang Mills theory, where the percolation description even allows f…
We consider QCD with two degenerate flavors of light quarks(up and down) at asymptotically high isospin chemical potential with zero baryon chemical potential and calculate for the first time a quantitative expression for the critical temperature of the deconfinement transition in this regime. At high isospin chemical potential and sufficiently low temperatures this theory becomes equivalent to a pure Yang-Mills theory and accordingly has a first order deconfinement phase transition. Although this was conjectured in a seminal paper by Son and Stephanov in the year 2001, the critical temperatur…
We demonstrate that weakly coupled, large N, d-dimensional SU(N) gauge theories on a class of compact spatial manifolds (including S^{d-1} \times time) undergo deconfinement phase transitions at temperatures proportional to the inverse length scale of the manifold in question. The low temperature phase has a free energy of order one, and is characterized by a stringy (Hagedorn) growth in its density of states. The high temperature phase has a free energy of order N^2. These phases are separated either by a single first order transition that generically occurs below the Hagedorn temperature or …
We argue that the deconfinement transition of large-N Yang-Mills theory is the condensation of very long and self-intersecting chromo-electric flux strings (QCD string), which is analogous to the formation of a black hole in string theory. We do this by using lattice gauge theory and matrix models. As evidence, we derive an analytic formula for the deconfinement temperature in the strong coupling limit and confirm it numerically. Dual gravity descriptions interpreted in this manner should make it possible to understand the details of the formation of black holes in terms of fundamental strings…
In the weak coupling limit of ${\rm SU}(N)$ Yang-Mills theory and the ${\rm O}(N)$ vector model, explicit state counting allows us to demonstrate the existence of a partially deconfined phase: $M$ of $N$ colors deconfine, and $\frac{M}{N}$ gradually grows from zero (confinement) to one (complete deconfinement). We point out that the mechanism admits a simple interpretation in the form of spontaneous breaking of gauge symmetry. In terms of the dual gravity theory, such breaking occurs during the formation of a black hole. We speculate whether the breaking and restoration of gauge symmetry can s…
We propose a novel approach to the confinement-deconfinement transition in Yang-Mills theories in the context of gauge-fixed calculations. The method is based on a background-field generalisation of the Landau gauge (to which it reduces at vanishing temperature) with a given, center-symmetric background. This is to be contrasted with most implementations of background field methods in gauge theories, where one uses a variable, self-consistent background. Our proposal is a bona fide gauge fixing that can easily be implemented on the lattice and in continuum approaches. The resulting gauge-fixed…
We give an analytical derivation of the confinement/deconfinement phase transition at finite temperature in the $SU(N)$ Yang-Mills theory in the $D$-dimensional space time for $D>2$. We elucidate what is the mechanism for quark confinement and deconfinement at finite temperature and why the phase transition occurs at a certain temperature. For this purpose, we use a novel reformulation of the Yang-Mills theory which allows the gauge-invariant gluonic mass term and calculate analytically the effective potential of the Polyakov loop average concretely for the $SU(2)$ and $SU(3)$ Yang-Mills theor…
We study the index of $\mathcal{N}=4$ Yang-Mills theory on $S^3\times\mathbb{R}$. We argue that the index should undergo a large $N$ deconfinement phase transition, by computing an upper bound of its `temperature.' We compute this bound by optimizing the phases of fugacities. The bound we find has some features analogous to the Hagedorn temperature. We briefly discuss a possible mechanism of the actual deconfinement transition below our bound. Our upper bound is lower than the Hawking-Page transition `temperature' of known BPS black holes in the AdS$_5$ dual. We thus expect the existence of ne…
We perform nonperturbative studies of N=4 super Yang-Mills theory by Monte Carlo simulation. In particular, we calculate the correlation functions of chiral primary operators to test the AdS/CFT correspondence. Our results agree with the predictions obtained from the AdS side that the SUSY non-renormalization property is obeyed by the three-point functions but \emph{not} by the four-point functions investigated in this paper. Instead of the lattice regularization, we use a novel regularization of the theory based on an equivalence in the large-N limit between the N=4 SU(N) theory on RxS^3 and …
We study the bosonic matrix model obtained as the high-temperature limit of two-dimensional maximally supersymmetric SU($N$) Yang-Mills theory. So far, no consensus about the order of the deconfinement transition in this theory has been reached and this hinders progress in understanding the nature of the black hole/black string topology change from the gauge/gravity duality perspective. On the one hand, previous works considered the deconfinement transition consistent with two transitions which are of second and third order. On the other hand, evidence for a first order transition was put forw…
We describe a monopole-like order parameter for the confinement-deconfinement transition in gauge theories where dynamical charges and monopoles coexist. It has been recently proposed in a collaboration with J. Froehlich. It avoids an inconsistency in the treatment of small scales present in earlier definitions of monopole fields by respecting Dirac's quantization condition for electromagnetic fluxes. An application to SU(2) lattice Yang-Mills theory is outlined, naturally fitting in the 't Hooft scenario for confinement.
We investigate the connection between Color Confinement and thermal Abelian monopoles populating the deconfined phase of SU(2) Yang-Mills theory, by studying how the statistical properties of the monopole ensemble change as the confinement/deconfinement temperature is approached from above. In particular we study the distribution of monopole currents with multiple wrappings in the Euclidean time direction, corresponding to two or more particle permutations, and show that multiple wrappings increase as the deconfinement temperature is approached from above, in a way compatible with a condensati…
The vortex free energy is studied in the random vortex world-surface model of the infrared sector of SU(3) Yang-Mills theory. The free energy of a center vortex extending into two spatial directions, which is introduced into Yang-Mills configurations when acting with the 't Hooft loop operator, is verified to furnish an order parameter for the deconfinement phase transition. It is shown to exhibit a weak discontinuity at the critical temperature, corresponding to the weak first order character of the transition.
We suggest that the gauge-invariant hedgehoglike structures in the Wilson loops are physically interesting degrees of freedom in the Yang--Mills theory. The trajectories of these ``hedgehog loops'' are closed curves corresponding to center-valued (untraced) Wilson loops and are characterized by the center charge and winding number. We show numerically in the SU(2) Yang--Mills theory that the density of hedgehog structures in the thermal Wilson--Polyakov line is very sensitive to the finite-temperature phase transition. The (additively normalized) hedgehog line density behaves like an order par…
A connection between the Hagedorn transition in string theory and the deconfinement transition in (non-supersymmetric) Yang-Mills theory is made using the AdS/CFT correspondence. We modify the model of zero temperature QCD proposed by Witten by compactifying an additional space-time coordinate with supersymmetry breaking boundary conditions thus introducing a finite temperature in the boundary theory. There is a Hagedorn-like transition associated with winding modes around this coordinate, which signals a topology changing phase transition to a new AdS/Schwarzschild blackhole where this coordi…
