Confinement and Deconfinement in Super-Yang-Mills Theories

The theory of strong interactions of hadrons is based on non-Abelian Yang-Mills theories, where the elementary degrees of freedom, the quarks and gluons, are subject to the phenomenon of confinement, meaning that they do not appear as free particles. At sufficiently high temperatures and densities, there is however a deconfinement phase transition which allows quarks and gluons as comparatively freely propagating particles within the so-called quark-gluon plasma. Confinement and deconfinement are well established phenomena, yet they still constitute an important open problem in theoretical physics, where much progress has been made in recent years with the help of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories. Of particular interest in the confined phase are so-called confined monopoles, which in supersymmetric theories are amenable to semi-classical analysis. One of the aims of this project will be the study of confined monopoles at the quantum level. In maximally supersymmetric theories another approach is possible through the conjectured duality of strongly coupled super-Yang-Mills theory with weakly coupled higher dimensional supergravity. Through this duality deconfined super-Yang-Mills plasmas are mapped to higher-dimensional black holes and this connection can be used to obtain quantitative predictions with potential interest to actual quark-gluon plasma physics. This connection will be another topic of this project with the aim to extend the predictions thus obtained, e.g. to include finite quark chemical potential.

The theory of strong interactions of hadrons is based on non-Abelian Yang-Mills theories, where the elementary degrees of freedom, the quarks and gluons, are subject to the phenomenon of confinement, meaning that they do not appear as free particles. At sufficiently high temperatures and densities, there is however a deconfinement phase transition which allows quarks and gluons as comparatively freely propagating particles within the so-called quark-gluon plasma. Confinement and deconfinement are well established phenomena, yet they still constitute an important open problem in theoretical physics, where much progress has been made in recent years with the help of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories. Of particular interest in the confined phase are so-called confined monopoles, which in supersymmetric theories are amenable to semi-classical analysis. One of the aims of this project will be the study of confined monopoles at the quantum level. In maximally supersymmetric theories another approach is possible through the conjectured duality of strongly coupled super-Yang-Mills theory with weakly coupled higher dimensional supergravity. Through this duality deconfined super-Yang-Mills plasmas are mapped to higher-dimensional black holes and this connection can be used to obtain quantitative predictions with potential interest to actual quark-gluon plasma physics. This connection will be another topic of this project with the aim to extend the predictions thus obtained, e.g. to include finite quark chemical potential.