The deconfinement phase transition in the Hamiltonian approach to Yang-Mills theory in Coulomb gauge

The deconfinement phase transition of SU(2) Yang-Mills theory is investigated in the Hamiltonian approach in Coulomb gauge assuming a quasi-particle picture for the grand canonical gluon ensemble. The thermal equilibrium state is found by minimizing the free energy with respect to the quasi-gluon energy. At the deconfinement phase transition the gluon energy, being infrared divergent in the confined phase, becomes infrared finite in the deconfined phase, while the ghost form factor remains infrared divergent in the deconfined phase but its infrared exponent is approximately halved. Using the lattice results for the gluon propagator to fix the scale the deconfinement transition temperature is obtained in the range of 275 to 290 MeV.