2022/06/16 by D. Yamada, Yamada, D.
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Lattice (hep-lat) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2206.08470
openalex publication_date 2022/06/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The effective potential of Yang-Mills theory at high temperature derived by Gross, Pisarski, Yaffe and Weiss is critically reexamined and it is argued that the groundstate of the potential at =0 is invalid, due to the infrared divergence of the Matsubara zero mode. This suggests that the thermal groundstate is dominated by infrared non-perturbative effects. Lattice simulations are carried out and the field A0 in the static gauge is observed to acquire nonzero, non-perturbative expectation values at high temperatures. A consequence is that thermal perturbation theory is inconsistent with the non-perturbative groundstate and it cannot account for all of the contributions to a thermodynamic quantity at any temperature. Related issues, including dimensional reduction and confinement, are also discussed.