Confinement/deconfinement phase transition and dual Meissner effect in SU(3) Yang-Mills theory

TL;DR

This paper explores the confinement-deconfinement phase transition in SU(3) Yang-Mills theory using a novel reformulation that highlights the dual Meissner effect, providing numerical evidence for the role of magnetic monopoles in quark confinement.

Contribution

It introduces a new non-Abelian dual superconductor picture and compares it with the conventional Abelian approach, demonstrating the dual Meissner effect's role in the phase transition.

Findings

Confinement/deconfinement transition linked to dual Meissner effect.

Magnetic monopole currents appear/disappear at the transition.

Restricted field captures key confinement features.

Abstract

We investigate the confinement-deconfinement phase transition at finite temperature of the SU(3) Yang-Mills(YM) theory on the lattice from a viewpoint of the dual superconductor picture based on the novel reformulation of the YM theory. In particular, we compare the conventional Abelian dual superconductor picture with the non-Abelian dual superconductor picture proposed in our previous works as the mechanism of quark confinement in the SU(3) YM theory. For the SU(3) YM theory, the reformulation allows two possible options called maximal and minimal. The maximal option corresponds to the manifestly gauge-invariant extension of the Abelian projection scheme, while the minimal option is really new to give the non-Abelian dual superconductor picture. Keeping these differences in mind, we present the numerical evidences that the confinement/deconfinement phase transition is caused by appearance/disappearance of the dual Meissner effects. First, we measure the Polyakov loop average at various temperatures to determine the critical temperature separating the low-temperature confined phase and the high-temperature deconfined phase. Second, we measure the static quark-antiquark potential. Third, we measure the chromoelectric and chromomagnetic flux created by a pair of quark and antiquark at temperatures below and above the critical temperature. We observe no more squeezing of the chromoelectric flux tube above the critical temperature. Finally, we measure the associated magnetic--monopole current induced around the chromo-flux tube and observe that the confinement/deconfinement phase transition is associated with the appearance/disappearance of the induced magnetic--monopole current, respectively. We confirm that these results are also obtained by the restricted field alone in both options, indicating the restricted field dominance in quark confinement at finite temperature.