Gluon chains and the quark-antiquark potential
Abstract
The flux tube between a quark and an antiquark in Coulomb gauge is imagined in the gluon-chain model as a sequence of constituent gluons bound together by Coulombic nearest-neighbor interactions. We diagonalize the transfer matrix in SU(2) lattice gauge theory in a finite basis of states containing a static quark-antiquark pair together with zero, one, and two gluons in Coulomb gauge. We show that while the string tension of the color-Coulomb potential (obtained from the zero-gluon to zero-gluon element of the transfer matrix) overshoots the true asymptotic string tension by a factor of about three, the inclusion of a few states with constituent gluons reduces the discrepancy considerably. The minimal energy eigenstate of the transfer matrix in the zero-, one-, and two-gluon basis exhibits a linearly rising potential with the string tension only about 1.4 times larger than the asymptotic one.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0910.2794,
title = {Gluon chains and the quark-antiquark potential},
author = {J. Greensite and S. Olejnik},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0910.2794},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
8 pages, 5 figures. Presented at the XXVII International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Vacuum Structure and Confinement), July 26-31, Beijing, China