PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

We explore a method developed in statistical physics which has been argued to have exponentially small finite-volume effects, in order to determine the critical temperature T-c of pure SU(3) gauge theory close to the continuum limit. The method allows us to estimate the critical coupling beta(c) of the Wilson action for temporal extents up to N-tau similar to 20 with less than or similar to 0.1% uncertainties. Making use of the scale setting parameters r(0) and root t(0) in the same range of beta-values, these results lead to the independent continuum extrapolations T(c)r(0) = 0.7457(45) and T-c root t(0) = 0.2489(14), with the latter originating from a more convincing fit. Inserting a conversion of r(0) from literature (unfortunately with much larger errors) yields T-c/Lambda(MS) over bar = 1.24(10).