Pure gauge flux tubes and their widths at finite temperature

Abstract

We study the flux tubes produced by static quark–antiquark, quark–quark and quark–adjoint charges at finite temperature in pure gauge SU(3) lattice field theory. This is relevant both for the study of flux tubes and strings, and for the interaction of heavy quarks and other colour sources in heavy ion collision physics. Our sources are static and our lattice correlators are composed of fundamental and adjoint Polyakov loops. To signal the flux tubes, we compute the square densities of the chromomagnetic and chromoelectric fields with plaquettes, in a gauge invariant framework. We study the existence and non-existence of flux tubes both below and above the deconfinement phase transition temperature Tc. Using the Lagrangian density as a profile distribution, we also compute the widths of the flux tubes and study their widening as a function of the inter-charge distance. We determine our results with both statistical and systematic errors.