The free energy of spherical bubbles in lattice SU(3) gauge theory

Abstract

We study the coefficients of the expansion F(R) = 1 3 c 3R 3+ 1 2 c 2R 2+c 1R of the free energy of spherical bubbles at T = T c in pure glue QCD using lattice Monte Carlo techniques. The coefficient c 3 vanishes at T = T c and our results suggest that the sign and the order of magnitude of c 1 is in agreement with the value c 1 = ± 32 9 πT 2 c (- for hadronic bubbles in quark phase, + for quark bubbles in hadronic phase) computed by Mardor and Svetitsky from the MIT bag model. The parameter c 2 is small in agreement with earlier determinations.