A Quenched Study of SU(3) Glueballs at Finite Temperature

Abstract

Thermal properties of glueballs in SU(3) Yang-Mills theory are investigated in a large temperature range from $0.3T_c$ to $1.9T_c$ on anisotropic lattices. The glueball operators are optimized for the projection of the ground states by the variational method with a smearing scheme. Their thermal correlators are calculated in all 20 symmetry channels. It is found in all channels that the pole masses $M_G$ of glueballs remain almost constant when the temperature is approaching the critical temperature $T_c$ from below, and start to reduce gradually with the temperature going above $T_c$. The correlators in the $0^{++}$, $0^{-+}$, and $2^{++}$ channels are also analyzed based on the Breit-Wigner $\emph{Ansatz}$ by assuming a thermal width $\Gamma$ to the pole mass $\omega_0$ of each thermal glueball ground state. While the values of $\omega_0$ are insensitive to $T$ in the whole temperature range, the thermal widths $\Gamma$ exhibit distinct behaviors at temperatures below and above $T_c$. The widths are very small (approximately few percent of $\omega_0$ or even smaller) when $T<T_c$, but grow abruptly when $T>T_c$ and reach values of roughly $\Gamma\sim \omega_0/2$ at $T\approx 1.9T_c$.