The Powers of Deconfinement

TL;DR

This paper investigates the trace anomaly in gluodynamics near the deconfinement transition, revealing dominant non-perturbative power corrections and interpreting them via a dimension-two gluon condensate, challenging the applicability of perturbation theory.

Contribution

It demonstrates that lattice data near deconfinement are dominated by non-perturbative power corrections, and interprets these in terms of a dimension-two gluon condensate, contrasting with perturbative expectations.

Findings

Lattice calculations are dominated by inverse power corrections in temperature.

Perturbative contributions are negligible within current error bars.

Dimension-two gluon condensate aligns with lattice data for Polyakov loop and free energy.

Abstract

The trace anomaly of gluodynamics encodes the breakdown of classical scale invariance due to interactions around the deconfinement phase transition. While it is expected that at high temperatures perturbation theory becomes applicable we show that current lattice calculations are far from the perturbative regime and are dominated instead by inverse even power corrections in the temperature, while the total perturbative contribution is estimated to be extremely small and compatible with zero within error bars. We provide an interpretation in terms of dimension-two gluon condensate of the dimensionally reduced theory which value agrees with a similar analysis of power corrections from available lattice data for the renormalized Polyakov loop and the heavy quark-antiquark free energy in the deconfined phase of QCD.