Deconfining Phase Transition on Lattices with Boundaries at Low Temperature

TL;DR

This paper investigates how boundary conditions modeling a cold exterior affect the deconfinement phase transition in lattice gauge theory, revealing significant finite-volume effects comparable to including quarks.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach to boundary conditions in lattice gauge theory that simulate a cold exterior, analyzing their impact on phase transition properties.

Findings

Boundary conditions significantly alter the pseudocritical temperature.

Finite volume effects are comparable to quark effects.

Transition width broadens under these boundary conditions.

Abstract

In lattice gauge theory (LGT) equilibrium simulations of QCD are usually performed with periodic boundary conditions (BCs). In contrast to that deconfined regions created in heavy ion collisions are bordered by the confined phase. Here we discuss BCs in LGT, which model a cold exterior of the lattice volume. Subsequently we perform Monte Carlo (MC) simulations of pure SU(3) LGT with a thus inspired simple change of BCs using volumes of a size comparable to those typically encountered in the BNL relativistic heavy ion collider (RHIC) experiment. Corrections to the usual LGT results survive in the finite volume continuum limit and we estimate them as function of the volume size. In magnitude they are found comparable to those of including quarks. As observables we use a pseudocritical temperature, which rises opposite to the effect of quarks, and the width of the transition, which broadens similar to the effect of quarks.