Chasing electric flux in hot QCD

In this talk, I present the status of attempts to analyze the behavior of the so-called spatial 't Hooft loop, which can be taken as an order parameter for the deconfinement phase transition in pure SU(N) gauge theory. While lattice data show a strikingly universal scaling of extracted k–string tensions for various values of k and N, the analytic approach to these observables might need some refinement.