Confinement and the effective string theory in SU(N->oo) : a lattice   study
  We calculate in the SU(6) gauge theory the mass of the lightest flux loop that winds around a spatial torus, as a function of the torus size, taking care to achieve control of the main systematic errors. For comparison we perform a similar calculation in SU(4). We demonstrate approximate linear confinement and show that the leading correction is consistent with what one expects if the flux tube behaves like a simple bosonic string at long distances. We obtain similar but less accurate results for stable (k-)strings in higher representations. We find some evidence that for k>1 the length scale at which the bosonic string correction becomes dominant increases as N increases. We perform all these calculations not just for long strings, up to about 2.5`fm' in length, but also for shorter strings, down to the minimum length, lc = 1/Tc, where Tc is the deconfining temperature. We find that the mass of the ground-state string, at all length scales, is not very far from the simple Nambu-Goto string theory prediction, and that the fit improves as N increases from N=4 to N=6. We estimate the mass of the first excited string and find that it also follows the Nambu-Goto prediction, albeit more qualitatively. We comment upon the significance of these results for the string description of SU(N) gauge theories in the limit of infinite N. 
Harvey Meyer and Michael Teper