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Variational analysis of the deconfinement phase transition

I. I. Kogan, A. Kovner, J. G. Milhano

hep-pharXiv:hep-ph/0208053

Abstract

We study the deconfining phase transition in 3+1 dimensional pure SU(N) Yang-Mills theory using a gauge invariant variational calculation. We generalize the variational ansatz of Phys. Rev. D52, 3719 (1995) to mixed states (density matrices) and minimize the free energy. For N > 3 we find a first order phase transition with the transition temperature of TC = 450 Mev. Below the critical temperature the Polyakov loop has vanishing expectation value, while above TC, its average value is nonzero. According to the standard lore this corresponds to the deconfining transition. Within the accuracy of our approximation the entropy of the system in the low temperature phase vanishes. The latent heat is not small but, rather, is of the order of the nonperturbative vacuum energy.

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