We study, for the first time, the Casimir effect in non-Abelian gauge theory using first-principles numerical simulations. Working in two spatial dimensions at zero temperature, we find that closely ...spaced perfect chromoelectric conductors attract each other with a small anomalous scaling dimension. At large separation between the conductors, the attraction is exponentially suppressed by a new massive quantity, the Casimir mass, which is surprisingly different from the lowest glueball mass. The apparent emergence of the new massive scale may be a result of the backreaction of the vacuum to the presence of the plates as sufficiently close chromoelectric conductors induce, in a space between them, a smooth crossover transition to a color deconfinement phase.
We present the results of first-principle numerical simulations of Euclidean SU(3) Yang-Mills plasma rotating with a high imaginary angular frequency. The rigid Euclidean rotation is introduced via ...``rotwisted'' boundary conditions along imaginary time direction. The Polyakov loop in the co-rotating Euclidean reference frame shows the emergence of a spatially inhomogeneous confining-deconfining phase through a broad crossover transition. A continuation of our numerical results to Minkowski spacetime suggests that the gluon plasma, rotating at real angular frequencies, produces a new inhomogeneous phase possessing the confining phase near the rotation axis and the deconfinement phase in the outer regions. The inhomogeneous phase structure has a purely kinematic origin, rooted in the Tolman-Ehrenfest effect in a rotating medium. We also derive the Euclidean version of the Tolman-Ehrenfest law in imaginary time formalism and discuss two definitions of temperature at imaginary Euclidean rotation.
In this paper, we carry out a low-temperature scan of the phase diagram of dense two-color QCD with Nf=2 quarks. The study is conducted using lattice simulation with rooted staggered quarks. At small ...chemical potential, we observe the hadronic phase, where the theory is in a confining state, chiral symmetry is broken, the baryon density is zero, and there is no diquark condensate. At the critical point μ=mπ/2, we observe the expected second-order transition to Bose-Einstein condensation of scalar diquarks. In this phase, the system is still in confinement in conjunction with nonzero baryon density, but the chiral symmetry is restored in the chiral limit. We have also found that in the first two phases the system is well described by chiral perturbation theory. For larger values of the chemical potential, the system turns into another phase, where the relevant degrees of freedom are fermions residing inside the Fermi sphere, and the diquark condensation takes place on the Fermi surface. In this phase, the system is still in confinement, chiral symmetry is restored, and the system is very similar to the quarkyonic state predicted by SU(Nc) theory at large Nc.
We show that the Casimir effect may lead to a deconfinement phase transition induced by the presence of boundaries in confining gauge theories. Using first-principle numerical simulations we ...demonstrate this phenomenon in the simplest case of the compact lattice electrodynamics in two spatial dimensions. We find that the critical temperature of the deconfinement transition in the vacuum between two parallel dielectric/metallic wires is a monotonically increasing function of the separation between the wires. At infinite separation the wires do not affect the critical temperature while at small separations the vacuum between the wires loses the confinement property due to modification of vacuum fluctuations of virtual monopoles.
Using first-principle lattice simulations, we demonstrate that in the background of a strong magnetic field (around 10^{20} T), the electroweak sector of the vacuum experiences two consecutive ...crossover transitions associated with dramatic changes in the zero-temperature dynamics of the vector W bosons and the scalar Higgs particles, respectively. Above the first crossover, we observe the appearance of large, inhomogeneous structures consistent with a classical picture of the formation of W and Z condensates pierced by vortices. The presence of the W and Z condensates supports the emergence of the exotic superconducting and superfluid properties induced by a strong magnetic field in the vacuum. We find evidence that the vortices form a disordered solid or a liquid rather than a crystal. The second transition restores the electroweak symmetry. Such conditions can be realized in the near-horizon region of the magnetized black holes.
We investigate the advantages of machine learning techniques to recognize the dynamics of topological objects in quantum field theories. We consider the compact U(1) gauge theory in three spacetime ...dimensions as the simplest example of a theory that exhibits confinement and mass gap phenomena generated by monopoles. We train a neural network with a generated set of monopole configurations to distinguish between confinement and deconfinement phases, from which it is possible to determine the deconfinement transition point, and to predict several observables. The model uses a supervised learning approach and treats the monopole configurations as three-dimensional images (holograms). We show that the model can determine the transition temperature with accuracy, which depends on the criteria implemented in the algorithm. More importantly, we train the neural network with configurations from a single lattice size before making predictions for configurations from other lattice sizes, from which a reliable estimation of the critical temperatures is obtained.
Quantum polarization effects associated with the conformal anomaly in a static magnetic field background may generate a transverse electric current in the vacuum. The current may be produced either ...in an unbounded curved spacetime or in a flat spacetime in a physically bounded system. In both cases, the magnitude of the electric current is proportional to the beta-function associated with renormalization of the electric charge. In our article, we investigate the electric current density induced by the magnetic field in the vicinity of a Dirichlet boundary in the scalar QED. Using first-principle lattice simulations we show that the electric current, generated by this “conformal magnetic effect at the edge” (CMEE), is well described by the conformal anomaly provided the conformal symmetry is classically unbroken. Outside of the conformal limit, the current density is characterized by an anomalous power law near the edge of the system and by an exponential suppression of the current far away from the edge.
We report Lee-Yang zeros behavior at finite temperature and density. The quark number densities, 〈n〉, are calculated at the pure imaginary chemical potential iμqI, where no sign problem occurs. Then, ...the canonical partition functions, ZC(n,T,V), up to some maximal values of n are estimated through fitting theoretically motivated functions to 〈n〉, which are used to compute the Lee-Yang zeros. We study the temperature dependence of the distributions of the Lee-Yang zeros around the pseudo-critical temperature region T/Tc=0.84-1.35.
In the distributions of the Lee-Yang zeros, we observe the Roberge-Weiss phase transition at T/Tc≥1.20. We discuss the dependence of the behaviors of Lee-Yang zeros on the maximal value of n, so that we can estimate a reliable infinite volume limit.