Cooling study of Dirac sheets inSU(3)lattice gauge theory belowTc

Abstract

Using a standard cooling method for $SU(3)$ lattice gauge fields, constant Abelian magnetic field configurations are extracted after dyon-antidyon constituents forming metastable $Q=0$ configurations have annihilated. These so-called Dirac sheets, standard and nonstandard ones, corresponding to the two $U(1)$ subgroups of the $SU(3)$ group, have been found to be stable if emerging from the confined phase, close to the deconfinement phase transition, with sufficiently nontrivial Polyakov loop values. On a finite lattice we find a nice agreement of the numerical observations with the analytic predictions concerning the stability of Dirac sheets depending on the value of the Polyakov loop.