Abstract
There are good reasons that the deconfinement phase transition of pure Yang-Mills theory at finite temperature should also be reflected in the behavior of gauge-fixed gluonic correlation functions. Understanding this in detail would provide another important example of how physical information can be extracted from gauge-dependent correlations, which is not always obvious. Therefore, herein we study the behavior of the Landau-gauge gluon propagator of pure across the phase transition in and dimensions in order to assess to what extend the corresponding critical behavior is reflected in these correlations. We discuss why it should emerge from a continuum perspective and test our expectations in lattice simulations. A comparison with furthermore reveals quite clear indications for a sensitivity of the gluon propagator to the order of the transition.
6 More- Received 3 November 2011
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.85.034037
© 2012 American Physical Society