Quark Confinement in the Deconfined Phase

Abstract

In cylindrical volumes with C-periodic boundary conditions in the long direction, static quarks are confined even in the gluon plasma phase due to the presence of interfaces separating the three distinct high-temperature phases. An effective "string tension" is computed analytically using a dilute gas of interfaces. At T_c, the deconfined-deconfined interfaces are completely wet by the confined phase and the high-temperature "string tension" turns into the usual string tension below T_c. Finite size formulae are derived, which allow to extract interface and string tensions from the expectation value of a single Polyakov loop. A cluster algorithm is built for the 3-d three-state Potts model and an improved estimator for the Polyakov loop is constructed, based on the number of clusters wrapping around the C-periodic direction of the cluster.