Background configurations, confinement and deconfinement on a lattice with BPS monopole boundary conditions

Finite temperature SU(2) lattice gauge theory is investigated in a three-dimensional cubic box with fixed boundary conditions provided by a discretized, static Bogomolʼnyi–Prasad–Sommerfield (BPS) monopole solution with varying core scale . Using heating and cooling techniques, we establish that for discrete -values stable classical solutions either of self-dual or of pure magnetic type exist inside the box. Having switched on quantum fluctuations we compute the Polyakov line and other local operators. For different and at varying temperatures near the deconfinement transition we study the influence of the boundary condition on the vacuum inside the box. In contrast to the pure magnetic background field case, for the self-dual one we observe confinement even for temperatures quite far above the critical one. Received: 11 October 1998 / Published online: 11 February 1999