First studies of the phase diagram of N=1 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory

The behavior of supersymmetric theories at finite temperatures differs from that of other theories in certain aspects. Due to the different thermal statistics of bosons and fermions, supersymmetry is explicitly broken for any non-zero value of the temperature. We study N=1 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory on the lattice at finite temperatures. This model is the simplest supersymmetric extension of the pure gauge sector of QCD, describing the interactions between gluons and their fermionic superpartners, the gluinos. At zero temperature the theory confines like QCD, and chiral symmetry is spontaneously broken. At high temperatures, deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration are expected to take place, but it is not known whether these two phase transitions coincide or not. First results on this topic, obtained in numerical simulations on the lattice, will be presented and discussed.

Phase structure of the N=1 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory at finite temperature

Supersymmetry (SUSY) has been proposed to be a central concept for the physics beyond the standard model and for a description of the strong interactions in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. A deeper understanding of these developments requires the knowledge of the properties of supersymmetric models at finite temperatures. We present a Monte Carlo investigation of the finite temperature phase diagram of the N=1 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory (SYM) regularised on a space-time lattice. The model is in many aspects similar to QCD: quark confinement and fermion condensation occur in the low temperature regime of both theories. A comparison to QCD is therefore possible. The simulations show that for N=1 SYM the deconfinement temperature has a mild dependence on the fermion mass. The analysis of the chiral condensate susceptibility supports the possibility that chiral symmetry is restored near the deconfinement phase transition.