Related papers: Wilson Loops and Random Matrices
We explain the microscopic origin of linear confinement potential with the Casimir scaling in generic confining gauge theories. In the low-temperature regime of confining gauge theories such as QCD, Polyakov lines are slowly varying Haar…
SU(N) gauge theories, extended with adjoint fermions having periodic boundary conditions, are confining at high temperature for sufficiently light fermion mass $m$. In the high temperature confining region, the one-loop effective potential…
Pure Yang-Mills theory in 2 spacetime dimensions shows exact Casimir scaling. Thus there are infinitely many string tensions, and this has been understood as a result of non-propagating gluons in 2 dimensions. From ordinary symmetry…
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 argue that the approximate ``Casimir scaling'' of the string tensions of higher-representation Wilson loops is an effect due to the finite thickness of center vortex configurations. It is shown, in the context of a simple model of the…
We examine how the average of double-winding Wilson loops depends on the number of color $N$ in the $SU(N)$ Yang-Mills theory. In the case where the two loops $C_1$ and $C_2$ are identical, we derive the exact operator relation which…
To help understand the centre dominance picture of confinement, we look at Wilson loop distributions in pure SU(2) lattice gauge theory. A strong coupling approximation for the distribution is developed to use for comparisons. We perform a…
A phenomenological analysis of the distribution of Wilson loops in SU(2) Yang-Mills theory is presented in which Wilson loop distributions are described as the result of a diffusion process on the group manifold. It is shown that, in the…
We introduce a D-dimensional Hamiltonian formalism for the study of Polyakov loop models of finite temperature gauge theories in D+1 dimensions. Polyakov loop string tensions are obtained from energy eigenstates of the Hamiltonian. For D=1,…
SU(N) gauge theories, extended with adjoint fermions having periodic boundary conditions, are confining at high temperature for sufficiently light fermion mass m. Lattice simulations indicate that this confining region is smoothly connected…
The vacuum of Yang-Mills theories can be imagined as a magnetically disordered medium with domain structure, with color magnetic flux in each domain quantized in units corresponding to the gauge group center. This model leads to the…
We analyze a two dimensional SU(3) gauge model of Wilson lines as a dimensionally reduced model of high temperature QCD_3. In contrast to perturbative dimensional reduction it has an explicit global Z(3) symmetry in the action. The phase…
We conjecture that in Yang-Mills theories the ratio between the ground-state glueball mass squared and the string tension is proportional to the ratio of the eigenvalues of quadratic Casimir operators in the adjoint and the fundamental…
Wilson loops provide the central gauge-invariant probe of confinement in lattice gauge theory. This survey reviews the statistical-mechanical formulation of lattice gauge ensembles, the strong-coupling and duality mechanisms behind area…
In earlier work we proposed a string theory dual to two dimensional Yang-Mills theory at zero coupling (which can also be thought of as a $BF$ theory), given by a Polyakov-like generalization of Ho\v rava's topological rigid string theory,…
Recent results applying resurgence theory to finite-temperature field theories yield a detailed analytic structure determined by topological excitations. We examine finite-temperature SU(N) lattice gauge theories in light of these results.…
We use gauge/string duality to analytically evaluate the renormalized Polyakov loop in pure Yang-Mills theories. For SU(3), the result is in a quite good agreement with lattice simulations for a broad temperature range.
The susceptibilities of the real and imaginary parts, as well as of the modulus of the Polyakov loop, are computed in SU(3) lattice gauge theory. We show that the ratios of these susceptibilities are excellent probes of the deconfinement…
We examine some properties of the filled Wilson loop observables in the Kazakov-Migdal model of induced QCD. We show that they have a natural interpretation in a modification of the original model in which the $Z_N$ gauge symmetry is broken…
The extraction of Wilson loops of confining gauge systems from their SUGRA (string) duals is reviewed. I start with describing the basic classical setup. A theorem that determines the classical values of the loops associated with a…