Continuum Thermodynamics of the GluoN_c Plasma

Abstract

We study the thermodynamics of SU(N_c) pure gauge theories for N_c=3, 4 and 6. The continuum and thermodynamic limits of bulk quantities such as the pressure, energy density and the entropy density are taken by using several different lattice spacings and volumes. There is no window of temperature in which a non-trivial conformal theory describes bulk thermodynamics. We extract the latent heat of the first-order deconfinement phase transitions and observe good scaling with N_c. For all quantities that we measure, strong N_c scaling holds, except, possibly, very close to the transition temperature, T_c; however we are unable to find strong evidence for scaling with the 't Hooft coupling in thermal quantities at the small values of N_c which we study.