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AdS black holes and thermal Yang-Mills correlators

Sean A. Hartnoll, S. Prem Kumar

Abstract

We study the real time correlators of scalar glueball operators for Yang-Mills theory at finite temperature in flat space. The analytic structure of the frequency space propagator in perturbative field theory is seen to be qualitatively different to the strong coupling results that may be obtained from perturbations about AdS black hole spacetimes: we find branch cuts rather than poles. This difference appears to persist away from the strict zero and infinite coupling limits, possibly suggesting a phase transition in large N thermal N = 4 SYM theory as a function of the 't Hooft coupling.

AdS black holes and thermal Yang-Mills correlators

Abstract

We study the real time correlators of scalar glueball operators for Yang-Mills theory at finite temperature in flat space. The analytic structure of the frequency space propagator in perturbative field theory is seen to be qualitatively different to the strong coupling results that may be obtained from perturbations about AdS black hole spacetimes: we find branch cuts rather than poles. This difference appears to persist away from the strict zero and infinite coupling limits, possibly suggesting a phase transition in large N thermal N = 4 SYM theory as a function of the 't Hooft coupling.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 11 sections, 71 equations, 6 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction and summary
  2. Thermal glueball propagators on ${{\Bbb R}}^{1,3}$
  3. Short times or the free theory
  4. Late times and weak coupling $\lambda\neq 0$
  5. Strong coupling correlators from gravity
  6. Persistence of poles under $\alpha'$ corrections
  7. Discussion
  8. Effect of thermal mass and width
  9. Thermal glueball propagators on ${{\Bbb R}} \times S^3$
  10. Expansion in harmonics
  11. The free theory two point function

Figures (6)

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