Deconfinement and continuity between thermal and (super) Yang-Mills theory for all gauge groups

TL;DR

This paper investigates the phase structure of N=1 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories with various gauge groups on R^3XS^1, revealing a first-order transition driven by monopole-instantons and topological molecules, supporting continuity with thermal YM deconfinement.

Contribution

It extends semiclassical analysis of phase transitions to a broad class of gauge groups, demonstrating a universal mechanism involving monopole-instantons and topological molecules.

Findings

Identifies a first-order phase transition driven by topological effects.

Shows the transition behavior resembles thermal deconfinement in pure YM.

Supports the conjecture of continuity between quantum and thermal phase transitions.

Abstract

We study the phase structure of N=1 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory on R^3XS^1, with massive gauginos, periodic around the S^1, with Sp(2N) (N>=2), Spin(N) (N>=5), G_2, F_4, E_6, E_7, E_8 gauge groups. As the gaugino mass m is increased, with S^1 size and strong coupling scale fixed, we find a first-order phase transition both for theories with and without a center. This semiclassically calculable transition is driven, as in SU(N) and G_2, arxiv.org/abs/1205.0290 and arxiv.org/abs/1212.1238, by a competition between monopole-instantons and exotic topological "molecules"---"neutral" or "magnetic" bions. We compute the trace of the Polyakov loop and its two-point correlator near the transition. We find a behavior similar to the one observed near the thermal deconfinement transition in the corresponding pure Yang-Mills (YM) theory in lattice studies (whenever available). Our results lend further support to the conjectured continuity, as a function of m, between the quantum phase transition studied here and the thermal deconfinement transition in YM theory. We also study the theta-angle dependence of the transition, elaborate on the importance of the quantum-corrected moduli-space metric at large N, and offer comments for the future.