Partial deconfinement: a brief overview

TL;DR

This paper reviews the concept of partial deconfinement in gauge theories, exploring its properties and significance in understanding phase transitions and gravity emergence in dual gravitational theories.

Contribution

It provides a concise overview of partial deconfinement, highlighting its role in gauge theory phase transitions and its duality with small black holes.

Findings

Partial deconfinement represents an intermediate phase in gauge theories.

It is dual to small black holes in gravitational theories.

Understanding partial deconfinement may shed light on gravity emergence.

Abstract

The confinement/deconfinement transition in gauge theory plays important roles in physics, including the description of thermal phase transitions in the dual gravitational theory. Partial deconfinement implies an intermediate phase in which color degrees of freedom split into the confined and deconfined sectors. The partially-deconfined phase is dual to the small black hole that lies between the large black hole and graviton gas. Better understandings of partial deconfinement may provide us with a clue how gravity emerges from the field theory degrees of freedom. In this article, we briefly review the basic properties of partial deconfinement and discuss applications.