High Temperature Limit of the Confining Phase

Abstract

The deconfining transition in non-Abelian gauge theory is known to occur by a condensation of Wilson lines. By expanding around an appropriate Wilson line background, it is possible at large $N$ to analytically continue the confining phase to arbitrarily high temperatures, reaching a weak coupling confinement regime. This is used to study the high temperature partition function of an $SU(N)$ electric flux tube. It is found that the partition function corresponds to that of a string theory with a number of world-sheet fields that diverges at short distance.