2020 journal article

Conundrum for the free energy of a holonomous gluonic plasma at cubic order

Physics Letters, Section B: Nuclear, Elementary Particle and High-Energy Physics, 803.

By: C. Korthals Altes*, H. Nishimura*, R. Pisarski* & V. Skokov n

co-author countries: France 🇫🇷 Japan 🇯🇵 Netherlands 🇳🇱 United States of America 🇺🇸

Contributors: C. Korthals Altes*, H. Nishimura*, R. Pisarski* & V. Skokov n

Source: ORCID
Added: March 21, 2020

We compute the term $\sim g^3$ in the free energy for a $SU(N)$ gauge theory with nonzero holonomy at nonzero temperature. If the holonomy is generated kinematically by the introduction of gauge invariant sources coupled to Polyakov loops, the contribution of charged (off-diagonal) gluons to the free energy at order $g^3$, ${\cal F}^{\left( 3\rm{:c.g.} \right)}$, is singular: ${\cal F}^{\left( 3\rm{:c.g.} \right)} \neq 0 $ without holonomy, but ${\cal F}^{\left( 3 \rm{:c.g.} \right)}= 0$ when the holonomy is nonzero, even infinitesimally. We show that the absence of the charged gluon contribution is required by gauge invariance alone and is therefore a universal feature.