Cooling study of Dirac sheets in SU(3) lattice gauge theory below T_c

Abstract

Using a standard cooling method for SU(3) lattice gauge fields constant Abelian magnetic field configurations are extracted after dyon-antidyon constituents forming metastable Q=0 configurations have annihilated. These so-called Dirac sheets, standard and non-standard ones, corresponding to the two U(1) subgroups of the SU(3) group, have been found to be stable if emerging from the confined phase, close to the deconfinement phase transition, with sufficiently nontrivial Polyakov loop values. On a finite lattice we find a nice agreement of the numerical observations with the analytic predictions concerning the stability of Dirac sheets depending on the value of the Polyakov loop.