The effect of restricting the plaquette to be greater than a certain cutoff
value is studied. The action considered is the standard Wilson action with the
addition of a plaquette restriction, which should not affect the continuum
limit of the theory. In this investigation, the strong coupling limit is also
taken. It is found that a deconfining phase transition occurs as the cutoff is
increased, on all lattices studied (up to 204). The critical cutoff on the
infinite lattice appears to be around 0.55. For cutoffs above this, a fixed
point behavior is observed in the normalized fourth cumulant of the Polyakov
loop, suggesting the existence of a line of critical points corresponding to a
massless gluon phase, not unlike the situation in compact U(1). The Polyakov
loop susceptibility also appears to be diverging with lattice size at these
cutoffs. A strong finite volume behavior is observed in the pseudo-specific
heat. It is discussed whether these results could still be consistent with the
standard crossover picture which precludes the existence of a deconfining phase
transition on an infinite symmetric lattice.Comment: 4 pages latex, 6 ps figures, uses espcrc2.sty (included). Poster
presented at LATTICE96(topology