A perturbative description of the deconfinement transition in Yang-Mills theories

TL;DR

This paper presents a perturbative approach to studying the deconfinement transition in SU(N) Yang-Mills theories, successfully predicting transition orders and temperatures consistent with known results.

Contribution

It introduces a massive extension of the Landau-DeWitt gauge and performs one- and two-loop calculations to analyze the deconfinement transition.

Findings

Second-order transition for SU(2) with qualitative agreement in transition temperature.

First-order transition for SU(3) with qualitative agreement in transition temperature.

Two-loop calculations refine the critical temperature and thermodynamic quantities.

Abstract

We investigate the deconfinement transition of static quarks in SU(N) Yang-Mills theories using a perturbative approach based on a massive extension of the Landau-DeWitt gauge-fixed action, where the gluon mass term is related to the issue of Gribov ambiguities. A leading-order, one-loop calculation of the effective potential for the Polyakov loop produces a deconfinement transition of second order for the SU(2) theory and of first order for SU(3) with transition temperatures in qualitative agreement with known values. We also report on the results of a two-loop calculation of the critical temperature and of thermodynamical quantities in the SU(2) case.