Deconfinement and continuity between thermal and (super) Yang-Mills theory for all gauge groups

We study the phase structure of N = 1 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory on R3 × S1, with massive gauginos, periodic around the S1, with Sp(2N) (N ≥ 2), Spin(N) (N ≥ 5), G2, F4, E6, E7, E8gauge groups. As the gaugino mass m is increased, with S1 size and strong coupling scale fixed, we find a first-order phase transition both for theories with and without a center. This semiclassically calculable transition is driven, as in SU(N) and G2[1, 2], by a competition between monopole-instantons and exotic topological “molecules” — “neutral” or “magnetic” bions. We compute the trace of the Polyakov loop and its twopoint correlator near the transition. We find a behavior similar to the one observed near the thermal deconfinement transition in the corresponding pure Yang-Mills (YM) theory in lattice studies (whenever available). Our results lend further support to the conjectured continuity, as a function of m, between the quantum phase transition studied here and the thermal deconfinement transition in YM theory. We also study the θ-angle dependence of the transition, elaborate on the importance of the quantum-corrected moduli-space metric at large N, and offer comments for the future. © 2014, The Authors.