Revisiting glueball wave functions at zero and finite temperature

TL;DR

This study investigates the sizes and thermal behavior of glueballs in a 3D lattice gauge model, providing continuum-extrapolated radii and analyzing their properties across the deconfinement transition.

Contribution

It offers the first continuum-limit estimates of glueball radii and examines their stability at finite temperature in a lattice gauge theory.

Findings

Glueball radii are approximately 0.28 and 0.52 fm for scalar and tensor states.

No significant changes in glueball wave functions and masses across the deconfinement transition.

Deconfinement transition resembles the 2D XY model transition.

Abstract

We study the sizes and thermal properties of glueballs in a three dimensional compact Abelian gauge model on improved lattice. We predict the radii of $\sim 0.60$ and $\sim 1.12$ in the units of string tension, or $\sim 0.28$ and $\sim 0.52$ fm, for the scalar and tensor glueballs, respectively. We perform a well controlled extrapolation of the radii to the continuum limit and observe that our results agree with the predicted values. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we extract the pole-mass of the lowest scalar and tensor glueballs from the temporal correlators at finite temperature. We see a clear evidence of the deconfined phase, and the transition appears to be similar to that of the two-dimensional XY model as expected from universality arguments. Our results show no significant changes in the glueball wave functions and masses in the deconfined phase.