Deconfinement phase transition in the Hamiltonian approach to Yang–Mills theory in Coulomb gauge

Institute for Theoretischel Physics University of Tübingen Auf der Morgenstelle 14 D-72076 Tübingen

^a e-mail: hugo.reinhardt@uni-tuebingen.de
^b e-mail: campa@tphys.physik.uni-tuebingen.de
^c e-mail: heffner@tphys.physik.uni-tuebingen.de

Published online: 29 April 2014

Abstract

Recent results obtained for the deconfinement phase transition within the Hamiltonian approach to Yang–Mills theory are reviewed. Assuming a quasiparticle picture for the grand canonical gluon ensemble the thermal equilibrium state is found by minimizing the free energy with respect to the quasi-gluon energy. The deconfinement phase transition is accompanied by a drastic change of the infrared exponents of the ghost and gluon propagators. Above the phase transition the ghost form factor remains infrared divergent but its infrared exponent is approximately halved. The gluon energy being infrared divergent in the confined phase becomes infrared finite in the deconfined phase. Furthermore, the effective potential of the order parameter for confinement is calculated for SU(N) Yang–Mills theory in the Hamiltonian approach by compactifying one spatial dimension and using a background gauge fixing. In the simplest truncation, neglecting the ghost and using the ultraviolet form of the gluon energy, we recover the Weiss potential. From the full non-perturbative potential (with the ghost included) we extract a critical temperature of the deconfinement phase transition of 269 MeV for the gauge group SU(2) and 283 MeV for SU(3).