Effective Action and Phase Transitions in Yang-Mills Theory on Spheres

We study the covariantly constant Savvidy-type chromomagnetic vacuum in finite-temperature Yang-Mills theory on the four-dimensional curved spacetime. Motivated by the fact that a positive spatial curvature acts as an effective gluon mass we consider the compact Euclidean spacetime S ¹ × S ¹ × S ², with the radius of the first circle determined by the temperature a ₁ = (2π T)⁻¹. We show that covariantly constant Yang-Mills fields on S ² cannot be arbitrary but are rather a collection of monopole-antimonopole pairs. We compute the heat kernels of all relevant operators exactly and show that the gluon operator on such a background has negative modes for any compact semi-simple gauge group. We compute the infrared regularized effective action and apply the result for the computation of the entropy and the heat capacity of the quark-gluon gas. We compute the heat capacity for the gauge group SU(2N) for a field configuration of N monopole-antimonopole pairs. We show that in the high-temperature limit the heat capacity per unit volume is well defined in the infrared limit and exhibits a typical behavior of second-order phase transition ~ (T-T_c)^-3/2{\sim(T-T_c)^{-3/2}} with the critical temperature T _c  = (2π a)⁻¹, where a is the radius of the 2-sphere S ².