Properties of the deconfining phase transition in SU(N) gauge theories

By Biagio Lucini, M. Teper, U. Wenger. 2005

223 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We extend our earlier investigation of the finite temperature deconfinement transition in SU(N) gauge theories, with the emphasis on what happens as N??. We calculate the latent heat, Lh, in the continuum limit, and find the expected behaviour, LhN2, at large N. We confirm that the phase transition, which is second order for SU(2) and weakly first order for SU(3), becomes robustly first order for N ? 4 and strengthens as N increases. As an aside, we explain why the SU(2) specific heat shows no sign of any peak as T is varied across what is supposedly a second order phase transition. We calculate the effective string tension and electric gluon masses at T Tc confirming the discontinuous nature of the transition for N ? 3. We explicitly show that the large-N `spatial' string tension does not vary with T for T ? Tc and that it is discontinuous at T = Tc. For T ? Tc it increases T2 to a good approximation, and the k-string tension ratios closely satisfy Casimir Scaling. Within very small errors, we find a single Tc at which all the k-strings deconfine, i.e. a step-by-step breaking of the relevant centre symmetry does not occur. We calculate the interface tension but are unable to distinguish between the N or N2 variations, each of which can lead to a striking but different N = ? deconfinement scenario. We remark on the location of the bulk phase transition, which bounds the range of our large-N calculations on the strong coupling side, and within whose hysteresis some of our larger-N calculations are performed.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/73337e7490194bda623c8091e05666b5d957628b

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Properties of hot and dense matter from relativistic heavy ion collisions (2015, background): “Indeed, lattice calculations in large Nc QCD suggest that Tc < TH , and that TH corresponds to the endpoint of a meta-stable hadronic phase above Tc [77].”
Improved Holographic QCD (2010, methodology): “An additional quantity of relevance is the value for the “dimensionless” latent heat per unit volume, Lh/T 4 c which for large Nc was found in [59] to be (Lh/T 4 c )lat = 0.”
Precision SU(3) lattice thermodynamics for a large temperature range (2012, background): “4 is fairly well known from the literature [43, 53, 54].”
Improved holographic Yang–Mills at finite temperature: Comparison with data (2009, methodology): “For the lattice result, we take the large Nc result of [27], Tc/ √ σ = 0.”
Self-Interacting Dark Matter from a Non-Abelian Hidden Sector (2014, background): “[80] B.”
Holography and thermodynamics of 5D dilaton-gravity (2008, background): “Let us remark however, that, neither in the lattice studies of [33] nor in our numerical investigations, one has encountered such transitions.”
QCD at finite temperature and chemical potential from Dyson–Schwinger equations (2018, background): “[28], whereas other gauge groups result in different values [140].”