Continuum thermodynamics of the SU(N_c) gluon plasma

Abstract

We study the thermodynamics of SU(N_c) pure gauge theories for N_c=3, 4 and 6. The continuum and thermodynamic limits of bulk quantities such as the pressure (p), energy density (∈) and the entropy density (s) are taken by using several different lattice spacings and volumes. There is no window of temperature in which a nontrivial conformal theory describes bulk thermodynamics. We extract the latent heat of the first-order deconfinement phase transitions and observe good scaling with N_c. For all quantities that we measure, strong N_c scaling holds, except, possibly, very close to the transition temperature, T_c; however we are unable to find strong evidence for scaling with the 't Hooft coupling in thermal quantities at the small values of N_c which we study.