SU(3) Deconfining Phase Transition with Confined Boundary Conditions

Equilibrium simulations of SU(3) lattice gauge theory (LGT) are usually performed with periodic boundary conditions (BCs). In contrast to that one has confined BCs for the deconfined regions created in heavy ion collisions. We show that the change of BCs leads to quantitative corrections, which survive for finite volumes in the continuum limit. We perform a pilot study of pure SU(3) LGT to estimate resulting effects when deconfined volumes are comparable to those typically encountered in the BNL RHIC experiment. We find that the deconfinement temperature rises (opposite to effects of quarks), while the first order transition becomes altered to a crossover (similar to effects of quarks)