Deconfinement transition in SU(2) Yang-Mills theory: A two-loop study

Understand

In a recent work we have proposed a perturbative approach for the study of the phase transition of pure Yang-Mills theories at finite temperature.

• This is based on a simple massive extension of background field methods in the Landau-DeWitt gauge, where the gluon mass term is related to the existence of Gribov ambiguities.
• We have shown that a one-loop calculation of the background field effective potential describes well the phase structure of the SU(2) and SU(3) theories.
• Here, we present the calculation of the next-to-leading-order contribution in perturbation theory for the SU(2) case.