Magnetic monopole loops generated from calorons with nontrivial holonomy

TL;DR

This paper investigates how calorons with nontrivial holonomy in a finite-temperature setting generate magnetic monopole loops, revealing phase-dependent behaviors that could shed light on quark confinement mechanisms.

Contribution

It provides numerical evidence that calorons produce monopole loops whose configurations change with temperature, indicating a phase transition relevant to confinement.

Findings

Calorons generate two monopole loops at small eta

Loops fuse into a single unwinding loop at large eta

Critical eta separates different monopole configurations

Abstract

We study whether or not magnetic monopoles are generated from calorons defined in the space $\mathbb{R}^3\times S^1$ with the period $\beta$. We give numerical evidence that one-caloron solution with nontrivial holonomy generates two loops of magnetic monopole and each loop passing through one of the two poles of the caloron winds along the time direction for small $\beta$, while two loops approach each other to fuse into an unwinding loop for large $\beta$, suggesting the existence of a critical value of $\beta$ separating two different phases. This work is a first step to explain quark confinement/deconfinement at finite temperature from the viewpoint of dual superconductor picture in our framework.