Many-Body Approach to Mesons, Hybrids and Glueballs

We represent QCD at the hadronic scale by means of an effective Hamiltonian, H, formulated in the Coulomb gauge. As in the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model, chiral symmetry is dynamically broken, however our approach is renormalizable and also includes confinement through a linear potential with slope specified by lattice gauge theory. We perform a comparative study of alternative many-body techniques for approximately diagonalizing H: BCS for the vacuum ground state; TDA and RPA for the excited hadron states. We adequately describe the experimental meson and lattice glueball spectra and perform the first relativistic, three quasiparticle calculation for hybrid mesons. In general agreement with alternative theoretical approaches, we predict the lightest hybrid states near but above 2 GeV, indicating the two recently observed $J^{PC} = 1^{-+}$ exotics at 1.4 and 1.6 GeV are of a different, perhaps four quark, structure. We also detail a new isospin dependent interaction from $q\bar{q}$ color octet annihilation (analogous to ortho positronium) which splits I = 0 and I = 1 states.