On the transition from confinement to screening in QCD1+1 coupled to adjoint fermions at finite N

We consider SU(N) QCD1+1 coupled to massless adjoint Majorana fermions, where N is finite but arbitrary. We examine the spectrum for various values of N, paying particular attention to the formation of multi-particle states, which were recently identified by Gross, Hashimoto and Klebanov in the N=∞ limit of the theory. It is believed that in the limit of vanishing fermion mass, there is a transition from confinement to screening in which string-like states made out of adjoint fermion bits dissociate into stable constituent “single particles”. In this work, we provide numerical evidence that such a transition into stable constituent particles occurs not only at large N, but for any finite value of N. In addition, we discuss certain issues concerning the “topological” properties exhibited by the DLCQ spectrum.