Understanding localisation in QCD through an Ising-Anderson model

Abstract

Above the QCD chiral crossover temperature, the low-lying eigenmodes of the Dirac operator are localised, while moving up in the spectrum states become extended. This localisation/delocalisation transition has been shown to be a genuine second-order phase transition, in the same universality class as that of the 3D Anderson model. The existence of localised modes and the effective dimensional reduction can be tentatively explained as a consequence of local fluctuations of the Polyakov loop, that provide 3D on-site disorder, in analogy to the on-site disorder of the Anderson model. To test the viability of this explanation we study a 3D effective, Anderson-like model, with on-site disorder provided by the spins of a spin model, which mimics the Polyakov loop dynamics. Our preliminary results show that localised modes are present in the ordered phase, thus supporting the proposed mechanism for localisation in QCD.