Magnetic component of Yang-Mills plasma

Abstract

Confinement in non-Abelian gauge theories is commonly ascribed to percolation of magnetic monopoles, or strings in the vacuum. At the deconfinement phase transition the condensed magnetic degrees of freedom are released into gluon plasma as thermal magnetic monopoles. We point out that within the percolation picture lattice simulations can be used to estimate the monopole content of the gluon plasma. We show that right above the critical temperature the monopole density remains a constant function of temperature, as for a liquid, and then grows, like for a gas.