Exploring the Tan contact term in Yang-Mills theory

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential to determine the thermodynamic properties of Yang-Mills theory by analyzing the Tan contact term, aiming to simplify free energy calculations through correlator measurements.

Contribution

It explores the relationship between the Tan contact and thermodynamic anomalies in Yang-Mills theory using lattice and functional methods, offering a new approach to compute free energy.

Findings

Tan contact correlates with thermodynamic anomalies in Yang-Mills theory

Lattice and functional methods provide consistent results for SU(2) case

Potential reduction in free energy computation complexity

Abstract

Reliably computing the free energy in a gauge theory like QCD is a challenging and resource-demanding endeavor. As an alternative, we explore here the possibility to obtain the associated thermodynamic anomaly by exploiting its relation to the Tan contact. Optimally, this would reduce the determination of the free energy to a high-precision calculation of two-point correlators. We study this possibility using the lattice and functional methods and compare them to the expected behavior for the SU(2) Yang-Mills case.