Vanishing Polyakov Loop for QCD with Twelve Massless Quarks

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Grable, Seth, Romatschke, Paul
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Grable, Seth
Romatschke, Paul
author_facet Grable, Seth
Romatschke, Paul
contents We consider continuum-formulation QCD in four dimensions with twelve massless fundamental quark flavors. Splitting the SU(\(N\)) gauge field into background and fluctuation parts, we use well-developed techniques to calculate the one-loop effective action for the theory. We find that for constant self-dual background field-strength tensor the notorious infrared divergences of the effective action cancel between gauge and matter sectors if the number of massless quark flavors is exactly . The ultraviolet divergencies of the effective action are non-perturbatively renormalized with a $β$-function that matches the known perturbative result in the high energy limit. The resulting UV- and IR-finite effective action possesses a non-trivial saddle which has lower free energy than the perturbative vacuum, and for which the expectation value of the Polyakov loop vanishes. Inclusion of finite temperature effects points to the presence of a first-order phase transition to the perturbative vacuum with a calculable critical temperature.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_12203
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Vanishing Polyakov Loop for QCD with Twelve Massless Quarks
Grable, Seth
Romatschke, Paul
High Energy Physics - Theory
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
Nuclear Theory
We consider continuum-formulation QCD in four dimensions with twelve massless fundamental quark flavors. Splitting the SU(\(N\)) gauge field into background and fluctuation parts, we use well-developed techniques to calculate the one-loop effective action for the theory. We find that for constant self-dual background field-strength tensor the notorious infrared divergences of the effective action cancel between gauge and matter sectors if the number of massless quark flavors is exactly . The ultraviolet divergencies of the effective action are non-perturbatively renormalized with a $β$-function that matches the known perturbative result in the high energy limit. The resulting UV- and IR-finite effective action possesses a non-trivial saddle which has lower free energy than the perturbative vacuum, and for which the expectation value of the Polyakov loop vanishes. Inclusion of finite temperature effects points to the presence of a first-order phase transition to the perturbative vacuum with a calculable critical temperature.
title Vanishing Polyakov Loop for QCD with Twelve Massless Quarks
topic High Energy Physics - Theory
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
Nuclear Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.12203