Continuum Thermodynamics of the GluoN_c Plasma

TL;DR

This study investigates the thermodynamics of SU(N_c) pure gauge theories for N_c=3, 4, and 6, analyzing bulk quantities and phase transitions to understand their behavior in the continuum limit.

Contribution

It provides a detailed lattice study of thermodynamic properties across multiple N_c values, highlighting scaling behaviors and phase transition characteristics.

Findings

No temperature window for non-trivial conformal behavior.

Latent heat scales well with N_c.

Strong N_c scaling observed in thermodynamic quantities.

Abstract

We study the thermodynamics of SU(N_c) pure gauge theories for N_c=3, 4 and 6. The continuum and thermodynamic limits of bulk quantities such as the pressure, energy density and the entropy density are taken by using several different lattice spacings and volumes. There is no window of temperature in which a non-trivial conformal theory describes bulk thermodynamics. We extract the latent heat of the first-order deconfinement phase transitions and observe good scaling with N_c. For all quantities that we measure, strong N_c scaling holds, except, possibly, very close to the transition temperature, T_c; however we are unable to find strong evidence for scaling with the 't Hooft coupling in thermal quantities at the small values of N_c which we study.