Flow of Hagedorn singularities and phase transitions in large $N$ gauge theories

Abstract

We investigate the singularity structure of the $(-1)^F$ graded partition function in QCD with $n_f \geq 1$ massive adjoint fermions in the large-$N$ limit. Here, $F$ is fermion number and $N$ is the number of colors. The large $N$ partition function is made reliably calculable by taking space to be a small three-sphere $S^3$. Singularites in the graded partition function are related to phase transitions and to Hagedorn behavior in the $(-1)^F$-graded density of states. We study the flow of the singularities in the complex "inverse temperature" $\beta$ plane as a function of the quark mass. This analysis is a generalization of the Lee-Yang-Fisher-type analysis for a theory which is always in the thermodynamic limit thanks to the large $N$ limit. We identify two distinct mechanisms for the appearance of physical Hagedorn singularities and center-symmetry changing phase transitions at real positive $\beta$, inflow of singularities from the $\beta=0$ point, and collisions of complex conjugate pairs of singularities.