Persistent homology analysis of deconfinement transition

in effective Polyakov-line model

Takehiro Hirakida,1, ∗ Kouji Kashiwa,2, † Junpei Sugano,1, ‡
Junichi Takahashi,3, § Hiroaki Kouno,4, ¶ and Masanobu Yahiro1, ∗∗
1
Department of Physics, Graduate School of Sciences, Kyushu University, Fukuoka 819-0395, Japan
2
Fukuoka Institute of Technology, Wajiro, Fukuoka 811-0295, Japan
3
Observation Division, Fukuoka Regional Headquarters,
Japan Meteorological Agency, Fukuoka 810-0052, Japan
4
Department of Physics, Saga University, Saga 840-8502, Japan
The persistent homology analysis is applied to the effective Polyakov-line model on a rectangular
lattice to investigate the confinement-deconfinement transition. The lattice data are mapped onto
arXiv:1810.07635v2 [hep-lat] 18 Oct 2018

the complex Polyakov-line plain without taking the spatial average and then the plain is divided
into three domains. The spatial distribution of the data in the individual domain is analyzed
by using the persistent homology. In the confined phase, the data in the three domains show
the same topological tendency characterized by the birth and death times of the holes which are
estimated via the filtration of the alpha complexes in the data space, but do not in the deconfined
phase. By considering the configuration averaged ratio of the birth and death times of holes, we
can construct the nonlocal order-parameter of the confinement-deconfinement transition from the
topological viewpoint of the data space.

I. INTRODUCTION From the topological viewpoint, it has been recently

Topological properties of the system can play a cru-
cial role in the classification of phase transitions. There
are several ways to apply topological knowledge in math-
ematics to physics. Recently, the persistent homol-
ogy [1, 2], which is one of the ways to introduce the
topological viewpoint to physics, attracted much more
attention in the classification of system’s structure [3–5].
In this letter, we utilize the persistent homology to in-
vestigate phase transitions in the effective Polyakov-line
model which is the effective model of quantum chromo-
dynamics (QCD) in the heavy quark mass regime.
The classification of the confinement-deconfinement
transition in the pure Yang-Mills theory and also QCD
is a long-standing problem and thus several proposal
have been stated so far; see Ref. [6]. At least in the
pure Yang-Mills theory, the Polyakov-line (loop) which
relates the gauge invariant holonomy can exactly de-
scribe the confinement-deconfinement transition because
it can be expressed by using the one-quark excitation
free-energy. The finite value of the Polyakov-line also in-
dicates the spontaneous breaking of Z3 symmetry. Thus,
we can regard the Polyakov-line as the order-parameter of
the confinement-deconfinement transition. However, in
QCD, the Polyakov-line is not an exact order parameter
anymore, since the existence of dynamical quark breaks
Z3 symmetry explicitly. Hence our understanding of the
confinement-deconfinement transition is still limited.
suggested that the confinement and deconfinement states
of QCD at zero temperature can be clarified via the topo-
logical order [7] which is characterized by the ground-
state degeneracy in the compactified space [8]. Analogy
of the topological order in QCD has been applied to fi-
nite temperature in Refs. [9–11] by considering the non-
trivial free-energy degeneracy at finite imaginary chemi-
cal potential. Therefore, it is natural to expect that the
topology can bring us to deeper understanding of the
confinement-deconfinement transition.
In the calculation of the persistent homology, we just
need the data set and analyze the data from filtration, as
explained later. In the calculation, we can prepare several
different data forms such as the bare data, the averaged
data, and the mapped data to analyze the topological
structure of data space. Therefore, we may systemati-
cally analyze the topological structure from the persis-
tent homology with different data forms.
In this paper, as a first step to apply the persistent ho-
mology to QCD, we consider the effective Polyakov-line
model as a QCD effective model in the heavy quark mass
regime. This article is organized as follows. In Sec. II the
persistent homology is explained. The formulation of the
effective Polyakov-line model is shown in Sec III. Numer-
ical results are shown in Sec IV. Section V is devoted to
summary.
II. PERSISTENT HOMOLOGY

∗ hirakida@email.phys.kyushu-u.ac.jp
† Let us express finite data points as P = (xi ∈ RN : i =
kashiwa@fit.ac.jp
‡ sugano@phys.kyushu-u.ac.jp 1, · · · , m) where N is the dimension of one data point
§ j.t.mhjkk.f.c@gmail.com and m is number of data points. The data points are in
¶ kounoh@cc.saga-u.ac.jp Euclidean space RN and it is so called the point cloud.
∗∗ orion093g@gmail.com For details of the computation of the persistent homology,
 2

see Ref. [12] as an example. far from the diagonal line.

To discuss the topological structure of the data points,
one interesting way is the calculation of the persistent
homology and then we need the geometric model [13]. III. EFFECTIVE POLYAKOV-LINE MODEL
One of the models is the r-ball model;
m
[ One of the interesting QCD effective models is the
Pr = Br (xi ), (1) effective Polyakov-line (EPL) model [19]. The grand
i=1 canonical partition function [20] is

where Br (xi ) = {y ∈ RN : ||y − xi || ≤ r} and r means

Z
Z = DU e−(SG +SQ ) , (6)
the radius of each ball and its center is xi . The condition
of two ball crossing is expressed as
where
Br (xi ) ∩ Br (yj ) 6= ∅. (2) X
SQ = LQ (x),
However, it becomes difficult to check the multi-ball x
crossing in the numerical computation. Thus, we employ 3 
XX 
†
the alpha complex in this study as the more convenient SG = −κ Tr[Ux ]Tr[Ux+ k̂
] + c.c. , (7)
version of the r-ball model as usual in the persistent ho- x k=1
mology analysis.
To determine the alpha complex, we first assign the where Ux means the Polyakov-line holonomy defined by
region Vi to the data points as Ux = diag(eiφ1 , eiφ2 , e−i(φ1 +φ2 ) ) with the real parameters
φ1 and φ2 , and the coupling constant κ in SG relates with
Vi = {x ∈ RN | ||x − xi || ≤ ||x − xj ||, 1 ≤ j ≤ m, j 6= i}, the inverse temperature β = 1/T . Note that SG and SQ
(3) correspond the gluon and quark actions, respectively, in
QCD. Unfortunately, we cannot take the line of constant
Sm
and then we have RN = i=1 Vi . The region, Vi , is so physics unlike the lattice QCD simulation and thus we
called the Voronoi region. In the actual calculation, we cannot set the precise T , but we may consider the high
consider the Voronoi region consisted with P . Next, we and low T regimes by varying κ.
consider the intersection defined by Since we can consider a variety of the EPL model and
thus we choose logarithmic LQ in this study as
Wi = Br ∩ Vi . (4) h n o2Nf
LQ = − ln det 1 + e−β(M−µ) Ux
It means that we restrict balls, Br (xi ), in the correspond-
ing Voronoi regions. The filtration for the alpha complex n o2Nf i
is now defined as × det 1 + e−β(M+µ) Ux† , (8)

α(P, r0 ) ⊂ · · · ⊂ α(P, rt ) ⊂ · · · ⊂ α(P, rtmax ),
where α is the nerve of Ψ = {Wi |i = 1, · · · , m} and
the filtration characterized by t. After considering the
geometric model, we should choose the algebraic descrip-
tion; we employ the persistent homology in this paper,
see Refs. [14–16]. Actually, by using this filtration, we
can calculate the persistent homology. Actual construc-
tion of the alpha complex in the numerical simulation,
we employ DIPHADistributed Persistent Homology Al-
gorithm library [17] via the homcloud-base software [18].
Intuitively, the persistent homology counts holes cre-
ated via the filtration and then we should plot persistent
diagram whose horizontal and vertical axis are the birth
and death parameters; the birth parameter denotes the
creation time of the holes in the filtration and the death
parameter does the disappearing time of corresponding
holes; the time means rt2 . If the data points are almost
random, birth-death data sets appears very close to the
diagonal line of the persistent diagram. Thus, we may
pick up the nontrivial correlation between data points
from the persistent diagram, particular birth-death sets
(5) where M is the quark mass, µ is the quark chemical po-
tential and Nf = 3 is the number of flavor. Usually,
the confinement-deconfinement transition in this model
is characterized by the configuration average value h|L|i
of the spatial averaged Polyakov-line operator
1 X1
L= Tr[Ux ], (9)
V x 3
where V is the three-dimensional volume; small h|L|i,
h|L|i ∼ 0, indicates the confined phase and large h|L|i,
h|L|i ∼ 1, does the deconfined phase. L is not invari-
ant under Z3 transformation, but is not an exact order
parameter, since SQ breaks the Z3 symmetry explicitly.
To perform the path integral of the EPL model, we
use the Monte Carlo method; we generate configura-
tions to replace the integral by the statistical sum. For
the numerical simulation, we consider V = 243 , κ ∈
[0.120, 0.150], µ/T = 0, and two cases of M/T = 5
and 10. For reader’s convenience, we here show the κ-
dependence of h|L|i in Fig. 1 where configuration aver-
age is taken by 50 configurations as an example. We can
 3

clearly see that this model exhibits the same tendency as

QCD and there should be the phase transition between
κ = 0.135 and 0.140.

0.8
M/T = 5
M/T = 10
0.7

0.6

0.5
<|L|>

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1

0 FIG. 2. The schematic figure of Polyakov-line in the complex

-0.1
plain. To compute the persistent homology, we divide the
0.12 0.125 0.13 0.135 0.14 0.145 0.15 plain into three Z3 domains, Z0 , Z1 , Z2 .
κ

FIG. 1. The κ-dependence of h|L|i with M/T = 5, 10.

25 25
20 20
15 15
IV. NUMERICAL RESULTS 10 10
5 5

To analyze the spatial distributions of simulation data 0 0

via the persistent homology analysis, we consider follow-
25 25
ing isolation procedure: 20 20
0 15 0 15
5 10 5 10
10 10
1. Map bare data for each cite to the complex Z0
15
20
5
Z1
15
20
5
25 0 25 0
Polyakov-line plane, configuration by configura-
tion.
25
2. Complex Polyakov-line plain is divided into three
20
domains as shown in Fig. 2. Note that the Z1 and
15
Z2 domains are the Z3 -images of the Z0 domain.
10

3. Prepare three lists, Z0 , Z1 , and Z2 , as data storage 5

places. The storage places, Z0 , Z1 , and Z2 , become
the N 3 dimensional list since we try to maintain the
spatial information of the bare data.
4. Storage the mapped data to each list; if the data
are located in the Z0 domain in Fig. 2, the corre-
sponding cite is ON (full) in the Z0 group and the
corresponding cites are OFF (empty) in the Z1,2
groups.
First we consider the case with M/T = 10. The typical
examples of the spatial distribution of the data after the
above isolation procedure are shown in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4
for κ = 0.120 and κ = 0.150, respectively. At κ = 0.120
(confined phase), the data are uniformly distributed, but
the distribution is weighted toward the Z0 domain and
few data are located in the Z1 and Z2 domains at κ =
0.150 (deconfined phase).
The typical examples of the persistent diagram are
shown in Fig. 5 and Fig. 6 with κ = 0.120 and 0.150,
respectively. The horizontal and the vertical axes are the
0
25
20
0 15
5 10
10
Z2
15
20
5
25 0
FIG. 3. The spatial distributions of the data after the isola-
tion for κ = 0.120 and M/T = 10. The top left, top right and
bottom data show the mapped data of Z0 , Z1 and Z2 .
birth time bi and the death time di of the i-th hole, re-
spectively. The color bar expresses the creation number
of each hole.
Figure 7 summarizes typical shapes of data points in
the persistent homology analysis with the set of these
birth and death times: The shape (a) is the smallest cube
on the present rectangular lattice and (b) is the chipped
cube of (a). The shape (c) is the 2 × 2 × 2 cube but it
does not contain the data point at its center. Both (d)
 4

Dominant structures in each phase are summarized in

Table I.
25 25
20 20
15 15 TABLE I. Dominant structure for each phase.
10 10
5 5
Phase
Dominant structure Group
0 0 (d), (1.3888 · · · , 1.41666 · · · )
Confinement Z0 ,Z1 ,Z2 (b), (0.666 · · · , 0.75)
25 25
20 20 (e), (1.60714 · · · , 1.625)
0 15 0 15
5
10
15 5
10 5
10
15 5
10 (a), (0.5, 0.75)
Z0 20 Z1 20
25 0 25 0
Deconfinement Z0 (b), (0.666 · · · , 0.75)
(c), (0.5, 1.0)
25 Z1 , Z2 No dominant structure
20
15
10 κ=0.120, M/T = 10, Z0 κ=0.120, M/T = 10, Z1
10 10
5 10000 10000

0 8 8
1000 1000

Death time

Death time
25 6 100 6 100
20
0 15
5 4 10 4 10
10 10
15 5
Z2 20
25 0 2 1 2 1

0 0.1 0 0.1
FIG. 4. The spatial distributions of the data after the isola- 0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10
tion for κ = 0.150 and M/T = 10. The top left, top right and Birth time Birth time
κ=0.120, M/T = 10, Z2
bottom data show the mapped data of Z0 , Z1 and Z2 . 10
10000

8 1000

and (e) are cubes which can appear in the rectangular

Death time

6 100
parallelepiped. In these shapes, (b), (d) and (e) can be
4 10
expected to appear as the hole of the large structure of
mapped data and thus those creation numbers become 2 1

large; for example, the shape (c) can be considered as the 0 0.1
composite of eight (b) and thus they are created together. 0 2 4 6 8 10
Birth time
At κ = 0.120, the number of hole and its va-
riety of the shape are almost same for each list, FIG. 5. The persistent diagram for κ = 0.120. The top left,
since M/T is large and Z3 symmetry is approxi- top right, and bottom panels show the result of Z0 , Z1 , and
mately preserved. In this phase, the birth and death Z2 list, respectively.
time sets, (1.3888 · · · , 1.41666 · · · ), (0.666 · · · , 0.75) and
(1.60714 · · · , 1.625), dominate the persistent diagram
and these are corresponding to the shape (d), (b) and Next, we analyze the κ-dependence of the persistent
(c) in Fig. 7, respectively. In comparison, at κ = 0.150, homology with M/T = 10. However, the standard per-
mapped data are weighted toward the Z0 domain and sistent diagram is not convenient in the case and thus we
thus many holes which have the fast birth and death introduce the averaged ratio of the birth and death times
times are created. However, mapped data are very sparse as
in the Z1 and Z2 domains and thus we need long time to N hole
create these holes and then the death times are not much 1 X di
D/B ≡ , (10)
larger than the birth times, namely, the life times di − bi Nhole i
bi
of holes become very short. This fact can be seen from
Fig. 6. In the deconfined phase, the birth and death time where Nhole is the number of holes in each list. We here
sets, (0.5, 0.75), (0.666 · · · , 0.75) and (0.5, 1.0), dominate take the statistical average hD/Bi by using 50 configu-
the persistent diagram for the Z0 list and these are corre- rations and the result is shown in Fig. 8. In the confined
sponding to the shape (a), (c) and (b) in Fig. 7. In the Z1 phase, hD/Bi always becomes ∼ 1.07 for all lists. In
and Z2 lists, a few holes are created for possible varieties comparison, hD/Bi of the Z0 list is changed into ∼ 1.40,
of the shape and then the mapped data are very sparse but hD/Bi of Z1 and Z2 decreases toward ∼ 1.03 in
and thus we do not show typical shape shown in Fig. 7. the deconfined phase. This characteristic behavior indi-
 5

κ=0.150, M/T = 10, Z0 κ=0.150, M/T = 10, Z1

10 10
10000 10000

8 1000 8 1000
Death time

Death time
6 100 6 100

4 10 4 10

2 1 2 1

0 0.1 0 0.1
0 2 4 6 8 10 0 2 4 6 8 10
Birth time Birth time
κ=0.150, M/T = 10, Z2
10
10000

8 1000
Death time

6 100

4 10

2 1

0 0.1
0 2 4 6 8 10
FIG. 8. The κ dependence of hD/Bi for M/T = 10. Cube
Birth time symbol shows the results of Z0 , circle symbol shows the results
of Z1 , and triangle symbol shows the results of Z2 . The shapes
FIG. 6. The persistent diagram for κ = 0.150. the top left, on the figure represent the typical ones which dominate the
top right, and bottom panels show the result of Z0 , Z1 , and values in the confined and the deconfined phases.
Z2 list, respectively.

M/T= 5
1.5
Z0
1.45 Z1
1.4 Z2
1.35
1.3
<D/B>

1.25
1.2
1.15
1.1
1.05
1
0.115 0.12 0.125 0.13 0.135 0.14 0.145 0.15 0.155
κ

FIG. 9. The κ dependence of hD/Bi for M/T = 5. Cube

symbol shows the results of Z0 , circle symbol shows the results
of Z1 , and triangle symbol shows the results of Z2 .
FIG. 7. Typical shapes appearing in the persistent homology
analysis on the rectangular lattice. In the set (b, d), b and d
mean the birth and death time, respectively.
V. SUMMARY

In this study, we have investigated the confinement-

cates the shape change in each list by the confinement-
deconfinement transition in the Polyakov-line model via
deconfinement transition.
the persistent homology analysis on the rectangular lat-
Figure 9 shows hD/Bi with M/T = 5. The explicit tice. To compute the persistent homology, we divide the
breaking of Z3 symmetry is enhanced at small κ due to complex Polyakov-line plane into three domains, Z0 , Z1
the lighter quark mass, and the κ-dependence of hD/Bi and Z2 , and then the lattice data are mapped on the
becomes smooth, but asymptotic values at large κ are plane. We then prepare the Z0 , Z1 and Z2 lists to storage
same as the results at M/T = 10. the corresponding data. Our results are the following:
It should be noted that the statistic error becomes
quite small for the persistent homology analysis. It may 1. In the confined phase, the data are uniformly dis-
be considered that the shapes in each list are protected tributed on each list and thus we have similar per-
topologically. sistent diagram for each list. This means that each
 6

list has same topological data structure. Typical
shapes appearing in the data space are analyzed;
actual shapes are depicted in Fig. 7.
2. In the deconfined phase, the data are dense in the
Z0 domain, but they become sparse in the Z1 and
Z2 domains. It means that the Z0 and Z1,2 lists
have different topological structures in the data
space. In the case of the Z0 list, the smallest 1×1×1
cube and many small structures appear. In com-
parison, the Z1,2 lists have the structures which
have late birth time and short life time.
3. To clearly show the phase transition, we consider
the configuration averaged ratio of the birth and
death time. This quantity shows the quite different
behavior in the confined and the deconfined phases.
In particular, the ratios of the Z0 and Z1,2 lists de-
part each other when the deconfined properties ap-
pear in the system. The difference comes from the
structural change of the data by the confinement-
deconfinement transition.
4. By considering the configuration averaged ratio of
the birth and death times of holes, we can construct
the nonlocal order-parameter of the confinement-
deconfinement transition from the topological view-
point of the data space.
We can consider the following interesting and impor-
tant future works:
1. In this study, we do not investigate so much near
the phase transition point. The persistent homol-
ogy near the phase transition point should be neces-
sary. In particular, the dependence of the persistent
homology against the order of the phase transition
is interesting.
2. We here employ the effective Polyakov-line model,
but similar analysis of QCD is more interesting and
important. We now plan to attempt the persistent
homology to lattice QCD simulations.
These results will be shown in elsewhere.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors are thankful to Masahiro Ishii and Akihisa
Miyahara for fruitful discussions. This study is supported
in part by the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from
JSPS (No. 18K03618 and No. 17K05446).

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