Deconfinement of classical Yang-Mills color fields in a disorder potential

TL;DR

This paper investigates how classical Yang-Mills color fields behave in a disordered potential, revealing a transition from confinement to chaos and deconfinement, with subdiffusive spreading above a certain disorder threshold.

Contribution

It provides a combined numerical and analytical study of Yang-Mills fields in a disordered environment, highlighting the conditions for chaos and deconfinement, and compares with nonlinear Schrödinger models.

Findings

Above a threshold, chaos leads to deconfinement and subdiffusive spreading.

The algebraic growth exponent of the second moment is between 0.3 and 0.4.

Below the threshold, wavepackets remain confined or show very slow spreading.

Abstract

We study numerically and analytically the behavior of classical Yang-Mills color fields in a random one-dimensional potential described by the Anderson model with disorder. Above a certain threshold the nonlinear interactions of Yang-Mills fields lead to chaos and deconfinement of color wavepackets with their subdiffusive spreading in space. The algebraic exponent of the second moment growth in time is found to be in a range of 0.3 to 0.4. Below the threshold color wavepackets remain confined even if a very slow spreading at very long times is not excluded due to subtle nonlinear effects and the Arnold diffusion for the case when initially color packets are located in a close vicinity. In a case of large initial separation of color wavepackets they remain well confined and localized in space. We also present comparison with the behavior of the one-component field model of discrete Anderson nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation with disorder.