Speaker
Description
We study the Effective String Theory corrections beyond the Nambu-Got{\=o} action in SU(N) lattice gauge theories in 2 + 1 dimensions, for $N=3$ and $N=6$. We extract these corrections from a set of high-precision Monte Carlo simulations of Polyakov loop correlators at
finite temperatures close to the deconfinement transition. We also report an estimate for the SU(2) theory obtained from a reanalysis of
published data. We show that these corrections are in general very small, they increase with $N$ and are always compatible with the bounds derived from the S-matrix Bootstrap analysis. Moreover, since in 2+1 dimensions the deconfinement transition of the $N=3$ theory is of second order, our results allow for a non-trivial test of the Svetitsky-Yaffe conjecture which, in the neighbourhood of the critical point, maps the 2+1 dimensional SU(3) gauge theory into the two dimensional three-state Potts model. In particular we show that our
results for the correlator of Polyakov loops perfectly agree with an expression for the short distance spin-spin correlator in the Potts model
obtained using a conformal perturbation approach.
