  Owing to confinement, the fundamental particles of N=1 Supersymmetric
Yang-Mills (SYM) theory, gluons and gluinos, appear only in colourless bound
states at zero temperature. Compactifying the Euclidean time dimension with
periodic boundary conditions for fermions preserves supersymmetry, and
confinement is predicted to persist independently of the length of the
compactified dimension. This scenario can be tested non-perturbatively with
Monte-Carlo simulations on a lattice. SUSY is, however, broken on the lattice
and can be recovered only in the continuum limit. The partition function of
compactified N=1 SYM theory with periodic fermion boundary conditions
corresponds to the Witten index. Therefore it can be used to test whether
supersymmetry is realized on the lattice. Results of our recent numerical
simulations are presented, supporting the disappearance of the deconfinement
transition in the supersymmetric limit and the restoration of SUSY at low
energies.
