Speaker
Description
Analytic strong-coupling calculations and previous rotating-lattice simulations appear to predict opposite responses of deconfinement to rotation. We investigate this tension in pure $SU(3)$ gauge theory on anisotropic lattices at imaginary angular velocity over $1.5\leq\beta\leq4.5$. At strong coupling we find a reentrant deconfined--confined--deconfined sequence near the zero-rotation transition, in qualitative agreement with analytic strong-coupling theory. The corresponding nonmonotonic phase boundary locally continues to a decreasing transition temperature at real rotation. As $\beta$ increases, the reentrant interval closes between $\beta=2.75$ and $3.0$; at larger $\beta$ and moderate temperatures above $T_c^0$, the Polyakov loop instead initially increases with imaginary angular velocity, recovering the response observed in earlier lattice studies. We further show that quadratic and quartic fits to the same imaginary-rotation boundary yield opposite trends after analytic continuation. The results reconcile the strong-coupling and previous lattice observations as distinct coupling--temperature regimes and expose the cutoff and ansatz dependence that must be controlled when extrapolating to real rotation.
