Theta dependence of the deconfinement temperature in Yang-Mills theories

Abstract

We determine the theta dependence of the deconfinement temperature of SU(3) pure gauge theory, finding that it decreases in presence of a topological theta term. We do that by performing lattice simulations at imaginary theta, then exploiting analytic continuation. We also give an estimate of such dependence in the limit of a large number of colors N, and compare it with our numerical results.

Comments: 5 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Discussion and references added. Final version published in Phys. Rev. Lett