Partial Deconfinement at Strong Coupling on the Lattice

Abstract

We provide evidence for partial deconfinement -- the deconfinement of a SU($M$) subgroup of the SU($N$) gauge group -- by using lattice Monte Carlo simulations. We take matrix models as concrete examples. By appropriately fixing the gauge, we observe that the $M\times M$ submatrices deconfine. This gives direct evidence for partial deconfinement at strong coupling. We discuss the applications to QCD and holography.