Using spline interpolation to extract the pure SU(3) deconfinement temperature*

At sufficiently high temperatures and/or baryon chemical potential, nuclear matter is known to transition from a gas of hadrons to a plasma of quarks and gluons. In the limit of infinitely massive quarks, which is formally equivalent to a theory of only gluons, pure $SU(3)$, this transition is known to be of first order. In this study we use lattice field theory to extract the pure SU(3) deconfinement temperature $T_d$. Historically $T_d$ has been extracted using histogram reweighting. Here, we try an alternative approach based on spline interpolation.