Related papers: The 't Hooft loop from a center-vortex wave functi…
This article reviews the recent progress in twistor approaches to Wilson loops, amplitudes and their duality for N=4 super Yang-Mills. Wilson loops and amplitudes are derived from first principles using the twistor action for maximally…
We consider supersymmetric Wilson loops of the variety constructed by Drukker, Giombi, Ricci, and Trancanelli, whose spatial contours lie on a two-sphere. Working to second order in the 't Hooft coupling in planar N=4 Supersymmetric…
We prove that Wilson loop expectation values for arbitrary simple closed contours obey an area law up to second order in perturbative two-dimensional Yang-Mills theory. Our analysis occurs within a general family of axial-like gauges, which…
We consider the Wilson loop expectation in SU(2) lattice gauge theory in the presence of constraints. The constraints eliminate from the functional measure gauge field configurations whose physical interpretation is that of thick center…
Wilson loops provide the central gauge-invariant probe of confinement in lattice gauge theory. This survey reviews the statistical-mechanical formulation of lattice gauge ensembles, the strong-coupling and duality mechanisms behind area…
A model for the infrared sector of Yang-Mills theory based on magnetic vortices represented by (closed) random surfaces is investigated using lattice Monte Carlo methods. The random surfaces are governed by a surface area action and a…
We use the recently proposed supergravity approach to large $N$ gauge theories to calculate ordinary and spatial Wilson loops of gauge theories in various dimensions. In this framework we observe an area law for spatial Wilson loops in four…
We compute the 2-loop thermal partition function of Yang-Mills theory on a small 3-sphere, in the large N limit with weak 't Hooft coupling. We include N_s scalars and N_f chiral fermions in the adjoint representation of the gauge group…
I review results recently obtained within the Hamiltonian approach to Yang-Mills theory in Coulomb gauge. In particular, I will present results for the ghost and gluon propagators and compare these with recent lattice data. Furthermore, I…
In this paper we express the velocity dependent, spin dependent heavy quark potential $V_{q\bar q}$ in QCD in terms of a Wilson Loop $W(\Gamma)$ determined by pure Yang Mills theory. We use an effective dual theory of long-distance Yang…
We consider minimally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory with a Chern-Simons term on a flat spatial two-torus. The Witten index may be computed in the weak coupling limit, where the ground state wave-functions localize on the moduli space of…
For fields that vary slowly on the scale of the lightest mass the logarithm of the vacuum functional can be expanded as a sum of local functionals. For Yang-Mills theory the leading term in the expansion dominates large distance effects and…
We present a two-loop calculation of the supersymmetric circular Wilson loop in the N=2* super Yang-Mills theory on the four-sphere. We develop an efficient framework for computing contributing Feynman graphs that relies on using the…
We apply a stochastic version of the geometric (Ricci) flow, complemented with the stochastic flow of the gauge Yang--Mills sector, in order to seed the chromo-magnetic and chromo-electric vortices that source the area-law for QCD…
The 't Hooft partition function $Z_{\mathrm{tH}}[E_i;B_{ij}]$ is a discrete Fourier transform of Yang--Mills partition functions in background $\mathbb{Z}_N$ 2-form gauge fields and encodes information on confinement, Higgs, Coulomb and…
We consider double-winding, triple-winding and multiple-winding Wilson loops in the $SU(N)$ Yang-Mills gauge theory. We examine how the area law falloff of the vacuum expectation value of a multiple-winding Wilson loop depends on the number…
A model for the infrared sector of SU(2) Yang-Mills theory, based on magnetic vortices represented by (closed) random surfaces, is presented. The random surfaces, governed by an action penalizing curvature, are investigated using Monte…
The stable chromomagnetic vacuum for SU(2) Yang-Mills theory found earlier is shown to give a model for confinement in QCD, using Wilson loop, and a linear potential (in the leading order) for quark-antiquark interaction. The coefficient…
We construct an anomaly-preserving compactification of 4d gauge theories, including $SU(N)$ Yang-Mills theory, $\mathcal{N}=1$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, and QCD, down to 2d by turning on 't Hooft flux through $T^2$. It provides a…
We introduce a new topological effect involving interference of two meson loops, manifesting a path-independent topological area dependence. The effect also draws a connection between quark confinement, Wilson-loops and topological…