Abstract
Yang-Mills theory is studied at finite temperature within the Hamiltonian approach in Coulomb gauge by means of the variational principle using a Gaussian-type Ansatz for the vacuum wave functional. Temperature is introduced by compactifying one spatial dimension. As a consequence the finite-temperature behavior is encoded in the vacuum wave functional calculated on the spatial manifold where is the temperature. The finite-temperature equations of motion are obtained by minimizing the vacuum energy density to two-loop order. We show analytically that these equations yield the correct zero-temperature limit while at infinite temperature they reduce to the equations of the -dimensional theory in accordance with dimensional reduction. The resulting propagators are compared to those obtained from the grand canonical ensemble where an additional Ansatz for the density matrix is required.
- Received 26 January 2015
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.91.085022
© 2015 American Physical Society