We review our recent work on the glueball spectrum of pure Yang-Mills theory in 2+1 dimensions. The calculations make use of Karabali-Nair corner variables in the Hamiltonian formalism, and involve a determination of the leading form of the ground-state wavefunctional.
We give a comparison of the spectrum of Yang-Mills theory in $D=3+1$, recently derived with a strong coupling expansion, with lattice data. We verify excellent agreement also for 2$^{++}$ glueball. A deep analogy with the $D=2+1$ case is obtained and a full quantum theory of this approach is also given.
To set the stage, I discuss the $beta$-function of the massless O(N) model in three dimensions, which can be calculated exactly in the large N limit. Then, I consider SU(N) Yang-Mills theory in 2+1 space-time dimensions. Relating the $beta$-function to the expectation value of the action in lattice gauge theory, and the latter to the trace of the energy-momentum tensor, I show that $frac{d ln g^2/mu}{dln mu}=-1$ for all $g$ and all N in one particular renormalization scheme. As a consequence, I find that the Yang-Mills $beta$-function in three dimensions must have the same sign for all finite and positive bare coupling parameters in any renormalization scheme, and all non-trivial infrared fixed points are unreachable in practice.
We solve exactly the Dyson-Schwinger equations for Yang-Mills theory in 3 and 4 dimensions. This permits us to obtain the exact correlation functions till order 2. In this way, the spectrum of the theory is straightforwardly obtained and comparison with lattice data can be accomplished. The results are in exceedingly good agreement with an error well below 1%. This extends both to 3 and 4 dimensions and varying the degree of the gauge group. These results provide a strong support to the value of the lattice computations and show once again how precise can be theoretical computations in quantum field theory.
We present a formulation of N=(1,1) super Yang-Mills theory in 1+1 dimensions at finite temperature. The partition function is constructed by finding a numerical approximation to the entire spectrum. We solve numerically for the spectrum using Supersymmetric Discrete Light-Cone Quantization (SDLCQ) in the large-N_c approximation and calculate the density of states. We find that the density of states grows exponentially and the theory has a Hagedorn temperature, which we extract. We find that the Hagedorn temperature at infinite resolution is slightly less than one in units of (g^(2) N_c/pi)^(1/2). We use the density of states to also calculate a standard set of thermodynamic functions below the Hagedorn temperature. In this temperature range, we find that the thermodynamics is dominated by the massless states of the theory.
We present a study of the effective string that describes the infrared dynamics of SU(2) Yang-Mills theory in three dimensions. By combining high-precision lattice simulation results for Polyakov-loop correlators at finite temperatures close to (and less than) the deconfinement one with the analytical constraints from renormalization-group arguments, from the exact integrability of the two-dimensional Ising model that describes the universality class of the critical point of the theory, from conformal perturbation theory, and from Lorentz invariance, we derive tight quantitative bounds on the corrections to the effective string action beyond the Nambu-Goto approximation. We show that these corrections are compatible with the predictions derived from a bootstrap analysis of the effective string theory, but are inconsistent with the axionic string ansatz.