Potential for inert adjoint scalar field in SU(2) Yang-Mills thermodynamics

摘要

A scalar adjoint field is introduced as a spatial average over (anti)caloronsin a thermalized SU(2) Yang-Mills theory. This field is associated with thethermal ground state in the deconfining phase and acts as a background forgauge fields of trivial topology. Without invoking detailed microscopicinformation we study the properties of the corresponding potential, and wediscuss its thermodynamical implications. We also investigate the gluoncondensate at finite temperature relating it to the adjoint scalar field.