The Casimir effect and deconfinement phase transition

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the Casimir effect can induce a deconfinement phase transition in confining gauge theories, with the critical temperature depending on the separation between boundaries, as shown through numerical simulations in lattice electrodynamics.

Contribution

It provides the first numerical evidence that boundary-induced Casimir effects can trigger deconfinement transitions in gauge theories.

Findings

Critical temperature increases with boundary separation.

Boundaries can suppress confinement at small separations.

Deconfinement transition is driven by vacuum fluctuation modifications.

Abstract

We show that the Casimir effect may lead to a deconfinement phase transition induced by the presence of boundaries in confining gauge theories. Using first-principle numerical simulations we demonstrate this phenomenon in the simplest case of the compact lattice electrodynamics in two spatial dimensions. We find that the critical temperature of the deconfinement transition in the vacuum between two parallel dielectric/metallic wires is a monotonically increasing function of the separation between the wires. At infinite separation the wires do not affect the critical temperature while at small separations the vacuum between the wires looses the confinement property due to modification of vacuum fluctuations of virtual monopoles.