Rectangular Wilson Loops at Large N

This work is about pure Yang-Mills theory in four Euclidean dimensions with gauge group SU(N). We study rectangular smeared Wilson loops on the lattice at large N and relatively close to the large-N transition point in their eigenvalue density. We show that the string tension can be extracted from these loops but their dependence on shape differs from the asymptotic prediction of effective string theory.Comment: 47 pages, 21 figures, 8 table