Related papers: Polyakov Loop and Gluon Quasiparticles in Yang-Mil…
We show that the Polyakov loop approaches its asymptotic value at high temperatures {\it from below} in any strongly-coupled gauge theory at large $N_c$ with a dual supergravity description. In these theories the Polyakov loop can be used…
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…
We report on the results of numerical simulations of 1+1 dimensional SU(N) Yang-Mills theory with maximal supersymmetry at finite temperature and compactified on a circle. For large N this system is thought to provide a dual description of…
At very high temperatures Yang--Mills theories can be described through perturbation theory. At the tree level the time components of the gluon fields decouple and yield a dimensionally reduced theory. The expectation value of the Polyakov…
We study the properties of the Polyakov loop in strongly-coupled gauge plasmas that are conjectured to be dual to five dimensional theories of gravity coupled to a nontrivial single scalar field. We find a gravity dual that can describe the…
We discuss the effective action for Polyakov-Wilson loops winding around compact Euclidean time, which serve as order parameters for the finite temperature deconfinement transition in $SU(N)$ Yang-Mills gauge theory. We then apply our…
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…
Recently, it was argued that the thermal deconfinement transition in pure Yang-Mills theory is continuously connected to a quantum phase transition in softly-broken N=1 SYM theory on R^3 x S^1. The transition is semiclassically calculable…
A three-dimensional effective theory of Polyakov loops has recently been derived from Wilson's Yang-Mills lattice action by means of a strong coupling expansion. It is valid in the confined phase up to the deconfinement phase transition,…
We explore the thermodynamics of the gluon plasma in SU(3) Yang-Mills theory emerging from the non-trivial spatial dynamics of valence gluons. The lattice data suggest that these gluons interact with each other linearly at large spatial…
Confinement remains one the most interesting and challenging nonperturbative phenomenon in non-Abelian gauge theories. Recent semiclassical (for SU(2)) and lattice (for QCD) studies have suggested that confinement arises from interactions…
We study the Polyakov loop dynamics originating from finite-temperature Yang-Mills theory. The effective actions contain center-symmetric terms involving powers of the Polyakov loop, each with its own coupling. For a subclass with two…
We study Casimir scaling and renormalization properties of Polyakov loops in different irreducible representations in SU(N) gauge theories; in particular, we investigate the approach to the large-N limit, by performing lattice simulations…
We study the deconfining phase transition in 3+1 dimensional pure SU(N) Yang-Mills theory using a gauge invariant variational calculation. We generalize the variational ansatz of Phys. Rev. D52, 3719 (1995) to mixed states (density…
Two phenomenological models describing an SU(N) quark-gluon plasma are presented. The first is obtained from high temperature expansions of the free energy of a massive gluon, while the second is derived by demanding color neutrality over a…
We discuss the thermodynamics of gluons in the background of static quark sources. In order to do so we formulate the quenched limit of QCD at non-zero baryon number. A first numerical analysis of this system shows that it undergoes a…
At high temperature measurements of the Polyakov loop suggest a deconfinement transition to the (strongly interacting) quark-gluon plasma. At the same time at the infinitely large temperature the four-dimensional QCD is reduced to the…
We write down an effective theory of the Polyakov loop to investigate the deconfinement phase transition of imaginary-rotating gluonic matter using the strong-coupling expansion. We find the strength of the nearest-neighbor Polyakov-loop…
We describe how the general mechanism of partial deconfinement applies to large-$N$ QCD and the partially-deconfined phase inevitably appears between completely-confined and completely-deconfined phases. Furthermore, we propose how the…
We investigate the thermodynamics and phase structure of $SU(3)$ Yang-Mills theory on $\mathbb{T}^2\times\mathbb{R}^2$ with anisotropic spatial volumes in Euclidean spacetime in lattice numerical simulations and an effective model. In…