Spacelike Wilson Loops at Finite Temperature

TL;DR

This paper investigates the behavior of spacelike Wilson loops in high-temperature Yang-Mills theories, demonstrating an area law with a temperature-dependent string tension, and introduces a method to determine this tension from specific Wilson loop measurements.

Contribution

It provides a new approach using a large scale expansion to extract the temperature-dependent string tension from intermediate and symmetric Wilson loops.

Findings

Large spatial Wilson loops follow an area law at high temperature.

The string tension increases with temperature.

A method to determine string tension from Wilson loop measurements is proposed.

Abstract

In the high temperature phase of Yang-Mills theories, large spatial Wilson loops show area law behaviour with a string tension that grows with increasing temperature. Within the framework of the commonly used string picture we use a large scale expansion, which allows us to determine the string tension from measurements of intermediate and symmetric Wilson loops.