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Volume reduction in large-N lattice gauge theories [with adjoint fermions]

This work covers volume reduction in quantum field theories on a lattice at large $N$ (number of colors), as first described by Eguchi and Kawai in 1982. The volume reduction (or volume independence) means that the theory defined on an arbitrarily small lattice is equivalent in the large-$N$ limit to the theory on an infinite lattice with the same bare parameters. We analyze the volume reduction by means of Monte Carlo simulations using the lattice model on a single site (or a small fixed number of sites) with Wilson fermions in the adjoint representation, using $N$ up to 60. Most of the results focus on two flavours of Dirac fermions and the single fermionic flavour is also discussed where there is a significant difference of behaviour. We find that the $(Z_N)^4$ center symmetry, necessary for the realization of volume reduction, is unbroken in the reduced model for a large range of parameters and, in particular, that the maximum admissible value of the adjoint fermion mass is non-zero in the large-$N$ limit. We calculate physical quantities, such as the plaquette, the static quark potential and the eigenvalues of the Dirac operator. We analyze the finite-$N$ corrections and consider the practicality of volume-reduced models in supplementing the large-volume calculations.