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.

1+10 pages. 2 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Multiply wound Polyakov loops at strong coupling
• Matching the Hagedorn temperature in AdS/CFT

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Hedgehog black holes and the Polyakov loop at strong coupling
• A phase transition in commuting Gaussian multi-matrix models