Sensitivity of the Polyakov loop to chiral symmetry restoration

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the Polyakov loop, an important quantity in quantum chromodynamics, responds to chiral symmetry restoration, revealing its scaling behavior aligns with energy-like operators near the transition.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the Polyakov loop and heavy-quark free energy are sensitive to the chiral transition and scale according to 3D O(N) universality classes.

Findings

Polyakov loop sensitivity to chiral transition confirmed

Scaling behavior consistent with energy-like operators

Supports universality class predictions

Abstract

In the heavy, static quark mass regime of QCD, the Polyakov loop is well known to be an order parameter of the deconfinement phase transition; however, the sensitivity of the Polyakov loop to the deconfinement of light, dynamical quarks is less clear. On the other hand, from the perspective of an effective Lagrangian written in the vicinity of the chiral transition, the Polyakov loop is an energy-like operator and should hence scale as any energy-like operator would. We show here that the Polyakov loop and heavy-quark free energy are sensitive to the chiral transition, i.e. their scaling is consistent with energy-like observables in 3-$d$ $O(N)$ universality classes.