Inhomogeneous confining-deconfining phases in rotating plasmas

Abstract

We discuss the effects of rotation on confining properties of gauge theories focusing on compact electrodynamics in two spatial dimensions as an analytically tractable model. We show that at finite temperature, the rotation leads to a deconfining transition starting from a certain distance from the rotation axis. A uniformly rotating confining system possesses, in addition to the usual confinement and deconfinement phases, a mixed inhomogeneous phase which hosts spatially separated confinement and deconfinement regions. The phase diagram thus has two different deconfining temperatures. The first deconfining temperature can be made arbitrarily low by sufficiently rapid rotation while the second deconfining temperature is largely unaffected by the rotation. Implications of our results for the phase diagram of QCD are presented. We point out that uniformly rotating quark-gluon plasma should therefore experience an inverse hadronization effect when the hadronization starts from the core of the rotating plasma rather than from its boundary.