HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Abstract. The effective potential approach for composite operators is generalized to non-zero temperatures in order to derive the equation of state for pure SU (3) Yang-Mills fields. In the absence of external sources, this is nothing but the vacuum energy density. The key element of this derivation is the introduction of a temperature dependence into the expression for the bag constant. The non-perturbative analytical equation of state for gluon matter does not depend on the coupling constant, but instead introduces a dependence on the mass gap. This is responsible for the largescale structure of the QCD ground state. The important thermodynamic quantities, such as the pressure, energy and entropy densities, etc., have been calculated. We show explicitly that the pressure may vary smoothly around T c = 266.5 MeV, whereas all other thermodynamic quantities undergo drastic changes at this point. The proposed analytical approach makes it possible to control for the first time the thermodynamics of gluon matter at low temperatures, below T c . We reproduce the properties of the socalled "fuzzy bag"-type models through the presence of the mass gap in our equation of state. An analytic calculation of the gluon condensate is obtained as a function of temperature.