Yang-Mills correlators across the deconfinement phase transition

TL;DR

This paper calculates finite temperature ghost and gluon propagators in Yang-Mills theory across the deconfinement transition, revealing distinctive nonanalytic features related to the order parameter that could be observed in lattice simulations.

Contribution

It provides the first one-loop finite temperature propagator expressions in the Landau-DeWitt gauge for various gauge groups, highlighting differences from previous Landau gauge results.

Findings

Propagators show nonanalytic behavior at the transition.

Electric and magnetic gluon susceptibilities exhibit cusps.

Distinct signatures in ghost sector linked to the phase transition.

Abstract

We compute the finite temperature ghost and gluon propagators of Yang-Mills theory in the Landau-DeWitt gauge. The background field that enters the definition of the latter is intimately related with the (gauge-invariant) Polyakov loop and serves as an equivalent order parameter for the deconfinement transition. We use an effective gauge-fixed description where the nonperturbative infrared dynamics of the theory is parametrized by a gluon mass which, as argued elsewhere, may originate from the Gribov ambiguity. In this scheme, one can perform consistent perturbative calculations down to infrared momenta, which have been shown to correctly describe the phase diagram of Yang-Mills theories in four dimensions as well as the zero-temperature correlators computed in lattice simulations. In this article, we provide the one-loop expressions of the finite temperature Landau-DeWitt ghost and gluon propagators for a large class of gauge groups and present explicit results for the SU(2) case. These are substantially different from those previously obtained in the Landau gauge, which corresponds to a vanishing background field. The nonanalyticity of the order parameter across the transition is directly imprinted onto the propagators in the various color modes. In the SU(2) case, this leads, for instance, to a cusp in the electric and magnetic gluon susceptibilities as well as similar signatures in the ghost sector. We mention the possibility that such distinctive features of the transition could be measured in lattice simulations in the background field gauge studied here.