Deconfinement Phase Transition in the $SU(3)$ Instanton-dyon Ensemble

TL;DR

This paper extends the semiclassical dyon ensemble approach to SU(3) Yang-Mills theory, demonstrating the generation of a first-order deconfinement phase transition and exploring effects of trace deformation on confinement and topological properties.

Contribution

It introduces a semiclassical dyon ensemble model for SU(3) and shows it reproduces the deconfinement transition, also analyzing the impact of trace deformation on confinement at high temperatures.

Findings

The dyon ensemble induces a first-order deconfinement transition.

Correlations and topological susceptibility are characterized across temperatures.

Trace deformation can maintain confinement and topological features at high T.

Abstract

Confinement remains one the most interesting and challenging nonperturbative phenomenon in non-Abelian gauge theories. Recent semiclassical (for SU(2)) and lattice (for QCD) studies have suggested that confinement arises from interactions of statistical ensembles of instanton-dyons with the Polyakov loop. In this work, we extend studies of semiclassical ensemble of dyons to the $SU(3)$ Yang-Mills theory. We find that such interactions do generate the expected first-order deconfinement phase transition. The properties of the ensemble, including correlations and topological susceptibility, are studied over a range of temperatures above and below $T_c$. Additionally, the dyon ensemble is studied in the Yang-Mills theory containing an extra trace-deformation term. It is shown that such a term can cause the theory to remain confined and even retain the same topological observables at high temperatures.