Related papers: Supercooled Confinement
We examine the role of the center Z(N) of the gauge group SU(N) in gauge theories. In this pedagogical article, we discuss, among other topics, the center symmetry and confinement and deconfinement in gauge theories and associated…
The miniaturization of electronic devices has led to the prominence, in technological applications, of ultra-thin films with a thickness ranging from a few tens of nanometers to just about 1-2 nanometers. While these materials are still…
The aim of this talk is to give a brief introduction to the problem of confinement in QCD and to N=2 globally supersymmetric Yang-Mills gauge theories (SYM). While avoiding technicalities as much as possible I will try to emphasize the…
We study the nature of the zero-temperature phase transition between a d-wave superconductor and a Mott insulator in two dimensions. In this ``quantum confinement transition'', spin and charge are confined to form the electron in the Mott…
We study finite temperature properties of four dimensional QCD-like gauge theories in the gauge theory/gravity duality picture. The gravity dual contains two deformed 5d AdS metrics, with and without a black hole, and a dilaton. We study…
Confinement is a paradigmatic phenomenon of gauge theories, and its understanding lies at the forefront of high-energy physics. Here, we study confinement in a simple one-dimensional $\mathbb{Z}_2$ lattice gauge theory at finite temperature…
Phase transitions associated with nearly conformal dynamics are known to lead to significant supercooling. A notorious example is the phase transition in Randall-Sundrum models or their CFT duals. In fact, it was found that the phase…
Earlier, two of us and M. Unsal [arXiv:1112.6389] showed that some 4d gauge theories, compactified on a small spatial circle of size L and considered at temperatures 1/beta near deconfinement, are dual to 2d "affine" XY-spin models. We use…
We use gauge/gravity duality to study the thermodynamics of a generic almost conformal theory, specified by its beta function. Three different phases are identified, a high temperature phase of massless partons, an intermediate…
A class of large N SU(N) gauge theories on a compact manifold S^3 X R (with possible inclusion of adjoint matter) is known to show first order deconfinement transition at the deconfinement temperature. This includes the familiar example of…
We develop a systematic approach to confinement in N=1 supersymmetric theories. We identify simple necessary conditions for theories to confine without chiral symmetry breaking and to generate a superpotential non-perturbatively…
We study the relation of confinement and chiral symmetry breaking in gauge theories with non-trivial center, such as SU(N) gauge theories. To this end, we deform these gauge theories by introducing an additional control parameter into the…
It is proposed that the cooling of a thermalized SU($N$) gauge theory can be formulated in terms of a cascade involving three effective theories with successively reduced (and spontaneously broken) gauge symmetries, SU($N$) $\to$…
We show that the four-dimensional U(1) gauge theory in the continuum formulation has a confining phase (exhibiting area law of the Wilson loop) in the strong coupling region above a critical coupling $g_c$. This result is obtained by taking…
Four dimensional gauge theories in anti-de Sitter space, including pure Yang-Mills theory, exhibit a quantum phase transition between a deconfined phase and a confined phase as the gauge coupling is varied. We explore various mechanisms by…
Models where symmetries are predominantly broken (and masses are then generated) through radiative corrections typically produce strong first-order phase transitions with a period of supercooling, when the temperature dropped by several…
The confinement/deconfinement transition in gauge theory plays important roles in physics, including the description of thermal phase transitions in the dual gravitational theory. Partial deconfinement implies an intermediate phase in which…
The correspondence between supergravity (and string theory) on $AdS$ space and boundary conformal field theory relates the thermodynamics of ${\cal N}=4$ super Yang-Mills theory in four dimensions to the thermodynamics of Schwarzschild…
In this note, we discuss the basic elements that should appear in a gravitational system dual to a confining gauge theory displaying color superconductivity at large baryon density. We consider a simple system with these minimal elements,…
First-order phase transitions produce gravitational waves and primordial black holes. They always occur in field theories where symmetries are radiatively broken and masses are correspondingly generated. These theories predict a period of…