I study the localisation properties of low Dirac eigenmodes in 2+1 dimensional SU(3) pure gauge theory, both in the low-temperature, confined and chirally-broken phase and in the high-temperature, deconfined and chirally-restored phase, by means of numerical lattice simulations. While these modes are delocalised at low temperature, they become localised at high temperature, up to a critical point in the Dirac spectrum where a BKT-type Anderson transition takes place. All results point to localisation appearing at the deconfinement temperature, and support previous expectations about the close relation between deconfinement, chiral symmetry breaking, and localisation.
Contents1 Introduction 1 2 Localisation in lattice gauge theories 4 3 Lattice SU(3) pure gauge theory in 2+1 dimensions 7 4 Numerical results 9 4.1 Participation ratio 10 4.2 Spectral statistics 16 5 Conclusions and outlook 28with N f = 2 flavours of adjoint fermions [9] on the lattice: 2 here two phase transitions are present, a deconfining one at T dec and a chiral-symmetry-restoring one at T χ with T dec < T χ . Nonetheless, at T dec the chiral condensate jumps downwards, and a partial restoration of chiral symmetry happens via a first-order phase transition. It is also well known that the fate of chiral symmetry is determined by the spectrum of the Dirac operator near the origin. In fact, the celebrated Banks-Casher relation [11] establishes that the chiral condensate in the chiral limit is proportional to the spectral density of the Dirac operator near the origin. For finite but small quark masses, an accumulation of eigenmodes near the origin is still expected at low temperatures, leading to light pions and all the other phenomenological consequences for QCD due to its being close to a theory with spontaneously broken symmetry. At high temperatures, instead, the spectral density is expected to vanish near the origin, reflecting the restoration of chiral symmetry in the massless case. Given the close relation between confining and chiral properties of the theory, it is natural to wonder if confinement is somehow responsible for the accumulation of modes near the origin, and analogously if deconfinement causes the depletion of this spectral region. A similar question of course can be asked also for other gauge theories.Adding to the mistery, or possibly helping to solve it, a third phenomenon has been observed to take place in QCD around the critical temperature, namely the localisation of the lowest modes of the Dirac operator [12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Numerical studies on the lattice have shown that while in the low-temperature phase all the Dirac modes are extended throughout the whole system, above T c the lowest modes get localised [12][13][14][15][16][17][18] on the scale of the inverse temperature [16]. More precisely, modes are localised up to a temperature-dependent critical point in the spectrum, λ c = λ c (T ). 3 At λ c , a second-order phase transition takes place in the spectrum [19], and modes become delocalised. This type of tr...