We demonstrate the emergence of the Polchinski–Strominger term in the string representation of a Wilson loop in the confinement phase of the finite-temperature 3D Yang–Mills theory. At a temperature which is roughly twice smaller than the deconfinement critical temperature, the value of the coupling of that term becomes such that the string conformal anomaly cancels out, thereby admitting a fully quantum description of the quark–antiquark string in 3D rather than 26D.
We construct plasmon creation and annihilation operators for Yang–Mills theory at finite temperature. This provides a starting point for perturbation theory with resummation of hard thermal loops in a Hamiltonian framework.