Spatial 't Hooft loop to cubic order in hot QCD II

Abstract

In this paper we provide an exact formula for the area law of the 't Hooft loop for any SU(N) gauge group to cubic order in hot gauge theory. The correction is very small for all temperatures above $T_c$, in stark contrast to the cubic correction to the pressure. The gradient approximation in a previous paper, only valid for large N, is in excellent agreement with the present, exact evalution. Comparison to lattice data is good. Casimir scaling is violated by a small amount not yet resolved by the precision of lattice data.

Comments: 21 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Nucl. Phys. B. Minor changes made