The paper “Linear confinement in the partially-deconfined phase“, co-authored by Vaibhav Gautam, Masanori Hanada, Jack Holden (Southampton), and Enrico Rinaldi (RIKEN, Japan), has been published in the Journal of High Energy Physics (link here). In the paper, they consider the partially-deconfined saddle of large-N pure Yang-Mills theory lying between confined and deconfined phases, in which the color degrees of freedom split into confined and deconfined sectors. Evidence is provided for the case of the finite-temperature strong-coupling lattice gauge theory. In particular, analytic predictions are made assuming linear confinement in the confined sector, and then confirm these by numerical simulations. Some implications of the conjecture for QCD and holography are also discussed. The image below shows Figure 3 from the paper.