Acceleration-Induced Deconfinement Transitions in de Sitter Spacetime

Understand

In this note, we consider confining gauge theories in $D=2,3,4$ defined by $S^2$ or $T^2$ compactification of higher-dimensional conformal field theories with gravity duals.

• We investigate the behavior of these theories on de Sitter spacetime as a function of the Hubble parameter.
• We find that in each case, the de Sitter vacuum state of the field theory (defined by Euclidian continuation from a sphere) undergoes a deconfinement transition as the Hubble parameter is increased past a critical value.
• In each case, the corresponding critical de Sitter temperature is smaller than the corresponding Minkowski-space deconfinement temperature by a factor nearly equal to the dimension of the de Sitter spacetime.