Ideal topological gas in the high temperature phase of SU(3) gauge theory

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that above the finite temperature phase transition in SU(3) gauge theory, topological fluctuations behave as a non-interacting ideal gas of unit charge lumps, identified using a novel spectral analysis method.

Contribution

Introduces a new spectral method to count and analyze topological lumps, revealing their ideal gas behavior above the phase transition in SU(3) gauge theory.

Findings

Topological fluctuations form an ideal gas of unit charge lumps above the transition.

The joint distribution of positive and negative lumps matches that of an ideal gas.

The method allows detailed characterization of topological objects in lattice configurations.

Abstract

We show that the nature of the topological fluctuations in $SU(3)$ gauge theory changes drastically at the finite temperature phase transition. Starting from temperatures right above the phase transition topological fluctuations come in well separated lumps of unit charge that form a non-interacting ideal gas. Our analysis is based on a novel method to count not only the net topological charge, but also separately the number of positively and negatively charged lumps in lattice configurations using the spectrum of the overlap Dirac operator. This enables us to determine the joint distribution of the number of positively and negatively charged topological objects, and we find this distribution to be consistent with that of an ideal gas of unit charged topological objects.