Spatial ʹt Hooft loop to cubic order in hot QCD II Original Research Article

In this paper we provide an exact formula for the area law of the ʹt Hooft loop for any image gauge group to cubic order in hot gauge theory. The correction is very small for all temperatures above image, in stark contrast to the cubic correction to the pressure. The gradient approximation in a previous paper, only valid for large N, is in excellent agreement with the present, exact evaluation. Comparison to lattice data is good. Casimir scaling is violated by a small amount not yet resolved by the precision of lattice data.