On the stability of Dirac sheet configurations

Using cooling for SU(2) lattice configurations, purely Abelian constant magnetic field configurations were left over after the annihilation of constituents that formed metastable Q=0 configurations. These so-called Dirac sheet configurations were found to be stable if emerging from the confined phase, close to the deconfinement phase transition, provided their Polyakov loop was sufficiently non-trivial. Here we show how this is related to the notion of marginal stability of the appropriate constant magnetic field configurations. We find a perfect agreement between the analytic prediction for the dependence of stability on the value of the Polyakov loop (the holonomy) in a finite volume and the numerical results studied on a finite lattice in the context of the Dirac sheet configurations.