Acceleration-Induced Deconfinement Transitions in de Sitter Spacetime

TL;DR

This paper studies how confining gauge theories in various dimensions undergo deconfinement transitions in de Sitter space as the Hubble parameter increases, revealing a universal relation between de Sitter and Minkowski deconfinement temperatures.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the deconfinement transition in these theories occurs at a critical Hubble parameter, with a universal temperature ratio related to the spacetime dimension, extending previous results to new compactifications.

Findings

Deconfinement transition occurs at a critical Hubble parameter.

Critical de Sitter temperature is lower than Minkowski deconfinement temperature.

Temperature ratio is nearly equal to the spacetime dimension.

Abstract

In this note, we consider confining gauge theories in $D=2,3,4$ defined by $S^2$ or $T^2$ compactification of higher-dimensional conformal field theories with gravity duals. We investigate the behavior of these theories on de Sitter spacetime as a function of the Hubble parameter. We find that in each case, the de Sitter vacuum state of the field theory (defined by Euclidian continuation from a sphere) undergoes a deconfinement transition as the Hubble parameter is increased past a critical value. In each case, the corresponding critical de Sitter temperature is smaller than the corresponding Minkowski-space deconfinement temperature by a factor nearly equal to the dimension of the de Sitter spacetime. The behavior is qualitatively and quantitatively similar to that for confining theories defined by $S^1$ compactification of CFTs, studied recently in arXiv:1007.3996.