Time: 10:00-11:30 2024/04/10

Location: 401, 7th building, KITS

Speaker: Jack Holden (Tsinghua U., Beijing)

Abstract:

We introduce the partially deconfined phase in Yang-Mills. This is a phase lying between confined and deconfined phases in which only a subset of the colour degrees of freedom deconfine. We expect this phase to be a general feature of gauge theories, including QCD. We argue that flux tubes exhibiting linear confinement are formed in the confined sector, confirming this numerically for large-N pure YM. We explore potential signatures of the partially deconfined phase, including deviations from Haar randomness, condensation of instantons, and global symmetry breaking. We will give related arguments that show how random matrices allow us to derive Casimir scaling, a relationship of the string tension to Casimir operators known only empirically until now. Finally, we discuss implications for the QCD crossover and the mapping of degrees of freedom in AdS/CFT.