Abelian monopoles and center vortices in Yang-Mills plasma

Condensation of the Abelian monopoles and the center vortices leads to confinement of color in low temperature phase of Yang-Mills theory. We stress that these topological magnetic degrees of freedom are also very important in the deconfinement regime: at the point of the deconfinement phase transition both the monopoles and the vortices are released into the thermal vacuum contributing, in particular, to the equation of state and, definitely, to transport properties of the hot gluonic medium. Thus, we argue that a novel, magnetic component plays a crucial role. On the other hand, it was demonstrated that an effective three-dimensional description can be brought, beginning with high temperatures, down to the critical temperature by postulating existence of a system of 3d Higgs fields. We propose to identify the 3d color-singlet Higgs field with the 3d projection of the 4d magnetic vortices. Such identification fits well the 3d properties of the theory and contributes to interpretation of the magnetic component of the Yang-Mills plasma.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures; talk at Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum, September 1-6 2008, Mainz, German

Detecting a gravitational-wave background with next-generation space interferometers

Future missions of gravitational-wave astronomy will be operated by space-based interferometers, covering very wide range of frequency. Search for stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds (GWBs) is one of the main targets for such missions, and we here discuss the prospects for direct measurement of isotropic and anisotropic components of (primordial) GWBs around the frequency 0.1-10 Hz. After extending the theoretical basis for correlation analysis, we evaluate the sensitivity and the signal-to-noise ratio for the proposed future space interferometer missions, like Big-Bang Observer (BBO), Deci-Hertz Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observer (DECIGO) and recently proposed Fabry-Perot type DECIGO. The astrophysical foregrounds which are expected at low frequency may be a big obstacle and significantly reduce the signal-to-noise ratio of GWBs. As a result, minimum detectable amplitude may reach h^2 \ogw = 10^{-15} \sim 10^{-16}, as long as foreground point sources are properly subtracted. Based on correlation analysis, we also discuss measurement of anisotropies of GWBs. As an example, the sensitivity level required for detecting the dipole moment of GWB induced by the proper motion of our local system is closely examined.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures, references added, typos correcte

Gluon propagators and center vortices at finite temperature

We study influence of center vortices on infrared properties of gluons in the deconfinement phase of quenched QCD. We observe a significant suppression of the magnetic component of the gluon propagator in the low-momentum region after the vortices are removed from the gluon configurations. The propagator of the electric gluon stays almost unaffected by the vortex removal. Our results demonstrate that the center vortices are responsible for important nonperturbative properties of the magnetic component of the quark-gluon plasma.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures, talk presented at 27th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2009), Beijing, 26-31 Jul 200

Sigma Model BPS Lumps on Torus

We study doubly periodic Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS) lumps in supersymmetric CP^{N-1} non-linear sigma models on a torus T^2. Following the philosophy of the Harrington-Shepard construction of calorons in Yang-Mills theory, we obtain the n-lump solutions on compact spaces by suitably arranging the n-lumps on R^2 at equal intervals. We examine the modular invariance of the solutions and find that there are no modular invariant solutions for n=1,2 in this construction.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, published versio

Cosmological test of gravity with polarizations of stochastic gravitational waves around 0.1-1 Hz

In general relativity, a gravitational wave has two polarization modes (tensor mode), but it could have additional polarizations (scalar and vector modes) in the early stage of the universe, where the general relativity may not strictly hold and/or the effect of higher-dimensional gravity may become significant. In this paper, we discuss how to detect extra-polarization modes of stochastic gravitational wave background (GWB), and study the separability of each polarization using future space-based detectors such as BBO and DECIGO. We specifically consider two plausible setups of the spacecraft constellations consisting of two and four clusters, and estimate the sensitivity to each polarization mode of GWBs. We find that a separate detection of each polarization mode is rather sensitive to the geometric configuration and distance between clusters and that the clusters should be, in general, separated by an appropriate distance. This seriously degrades the signal sensitivity, however, for suitable conditions, space-based detector can separately detect scalar, vector and tensor modes of GWBs with energy density as low as ~10^-15.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figure

Forecasting the Cosmological Constraints with Anisotropic Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from Multipole Expansion

Baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) imprinted in the galaxy power spectrum can be used as a standard ruler to determine angular diameter distance and Hubble parameter at high redshift galaxies. Combining redshift distortion effect which apparently distorts the galaxy clustering pattern, we can also constrain the growth rate of large-scale structure formation. Usually, future forecast for constraining these parameters from galaxy redshift surveys has been made with a full 2D power spectrum characterized as function of wavenumber $k$ and directional cosine $\mu$ between line-of-sight direction and wave vector, i.e., $P(k,\mu)$. Here, we apply the multipole expansion to the full 2D power spectrum, and discuss how much cosmological information can be extracted from the lower-multipole spectra, taking a proper account of the non-linear effects on gravitational clustering and redshift distortion. The Fisher matrix analysis reveals that compared to the analysis with full 2D spectrum, a partial information from the monopole and quadrupole spectra generally degrades the constraints by a factor of $\sim1.3$ for each parameter. The additional information from the hexadecapole spectrum helps to improve the constraints, which lead to an almost comparable result expected from the full 2D spectrum.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

Transport Coefficients of Gluon Plasma

Transport coefficients of gluon plasma are calculated for a SU(3) pure gauge model by lattice QCD simulations on $16^3 \times 8$ and $24^3 \times 8$ lattices. Simulations are carried out at a slightly above the deconfinement transition temperature $T_c$, where a new state of matter is currently being pursued in RHIC experiments. Our results show that the ratio of the shear viscosity to the entropy is less than one and the bulk viscosity is consistent with zero in the region, $1.4 \leq T/T_c \leq 1.8$.Comment: 10 pages, Late

Detecting a stochastic background of gravitational waves in the presence of non-Gaussian noise: A performance of generalized cross-correlation statistic

We discuss a robust data analysis method to detect a stochastic background of gravitational waves in the presence of non-Gaussian noise. In contrast to the standard cross-correlation (SCC) statistic frequently used in the stochastic background searches, we consider a {\it generalized cross-correlation} (GCC) statistic, which is nearly optimal even in the presence of non-Gaussian noise. The detection efficiency of the GCC statistic is investigated analytically, particularly focusing on the statistical relation between the false-alarm and the false-dismissal probabilities, and the minimum detectable amplitude of gravitational-wave signals. We derive simple analytic formulae for these statistical quantities. The robustness of the GCC statistic is clarified based on these formulae, and one finds that the detection efficiency of the GCC statistic roughly corresponds to the one of the SCC statistic neglecting the contribution of non-Gaussian tails. This remarkable property is checked by performing the Monte Carlo simulations and successful agreement between analytic and simulation results was found.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, presentation and some figures modified, final version to be published in PR