To understand the phase transition phenomena, information theoretical approaches can pick up some important properties of the phenomena based on the probability distribution. In this paper, we show information theoretical aspects of the three-dimensional three-state Potts model with the external field which is corresponded to the QCD effective model with heavy quarks. The transfer mutual information which represents the information flow of two spin variables is numerically estimated based on the Markov-chain Monte Carlo method. The transfer mutual information has the peak near the confinement-deconfinement transition, and it may be used to detect the precursors of the transition. Since the transfer mutual information still has the peak even if the Polyakov-loop changes continuously and smoothly, we may pick up some aspects of the confinement-deconfinement nature from the information flow properties. Particularly, the transfer mutual information shows the significantly different behavior below and above the Roberge-Weiss endpoint existed in the pure imaginary chemical potential region, which may indicate the system change by the confinement-deconfinement transition.

• Received 2 October 2020
• Accepted 9 December 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.103.014014

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP³.

Published by the American Physical Society