Thermal N = 4 SYM theory as a 2D Coulomb gas

Abstract

We consider N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory with SU(N) gauge group at large N and at finite temperature on a spatial S^3. We show that, at finite weak 't Hooft coupling, the theory is naturally described as a two dimensional Coulomb gas of complex eigenvalues of the Polyakov-Maldacena loop, valued on the cylinder. In the low temperature confined phase the eigenvalues condense onto a strip encircling the cylinder, while the high temperature deconfined phase is characterised by an ellipsoidal droplet of eigenvalues.

arXiv comment1+10 pages. 2 figures

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Small shear viscosity in the semi quark gluon plasma
• Hard thermal loops, to quadratic order, in the background of a spatial 't Hooft loop
• Magnetic Heisenberg-chain/pp-wave correspondence
• Hedgehog black holes and the Polyakov loop at strong coupling
• Topology change in commuting saddles of thermal N=4 SYM theory
• Operator thermalisation in $d>2$: Huygens or resurgence
• A phase transition in commuting Gaussian multi-matrix models
• Supersymmetric gauge theories, Coulomb gases and Chern-Simons matrix models