Speaker
Description
Recent numerical results have provided evidence for a conjectured regime of finite temperature QCD where chiral symmetry remains unbroken but the system still confines. Moreover, it has been shown that observables constructed from non-perturbative excitations of the Yang-Mills vacuum, namely monopoles and vortices, can be highly sensitive to the deconfinement transition in pure Yang-Mills.
In this talk, we apply methods from topological data analysis (TDA), a field combining algebraic topology and data science, to extract features of Abelian monopoles from finite temperature SU(3) and QCD configurations. In particular, we investigate monopole currents across the deconfinement transition extracted from configurations using a maximally Abelian projection. We introduce novel observables, referred to as the complexity and simplicity, that characterise the topology of current networks and study their behaviour as a function of temperature. In the pure theory, we demonstrate that they precisely capture the quantitative features of the deconfinement phase transition. We then comment on the effectiveness of these observables at delineating the phase structure of the theory in the presence of dynamical fermions.