The Physical Phase of Dimensionally Reduced Gauge Theories

We investigate the relationship between the high temperature deconfined phase of the SU(2) gauge theory to the phases of the corresponding three dimensional adjoint Higgs model. For various temperatures we simulate the effective theory in a neighbourhood of the physical states, that is of those values of the coupling constants that describe the infrared behaviour of the four dimensional theory and which have been calculated by applying dimensional reduction techniques. We show that the physical points belong to the confined phase of the SU(2) adjoint Higgs model.