Dark Confinement-Deconfinement Phase Transition: A Roadmap from Polyakov Loop Models to Gravitational Waves

Understand

We explore the confinement-deconfinement phase transition (PT) of the first order (FO) arising in $SU(N)$ pure Yang-Mills theory, based on Polyakov loop models (PLMs), in light of the induced gravitational wave (GW) spectra.

• We demonstrate that the PLMs with the Haar measure term, involving models successful in QCD with $N=3$, are potentially incompatible with the large $N$ scaling for the thermodynamical quantities and the latent heat at around the criticality of the FOPT reported from the lattice simulations.
• We then propose a couple of models of polynomial form, which we call the 4-6 PLM (with four- and six-point interactions among the basic PL fields which have center charge 1) and 4-8 PLM (with four- and eight-point interactions), and discuss how such models can naturally arise in the presence of a heavy PL with charge 2.
• We show that those models give the consistent thermodynamical and large $N$ properties at around the criticality.