Related papers: Critical Boundary Conditions for the Effective Str…
In presence of a static pair of sources, the spectrum of low-lying states of any confining gauge theory in D space-time dimensions is described, at large source separations, by an effective string theory. Recently two important advances…
We study the boundary contribution to the low energy effective action of the open string describing the confining flux tube in gauge theories. The form of the boundary terms is strongly constrained by the requirement of Lorentz symmetry,…
We show that the four-dimensional U(1) gauge theory in the continuum formulation has a confining phase (exhibiting area law of the Wilson loop) in the strong coupling region above a critical coupling $g_c$. This result is obtained by taking…
We critically reconsider our recent observation of confining string shrinkage in pure glue SU(2) lattice gauge theory near the continuum limit. Using the advanced numerical techniques we argue that imperfect overlap with the string ground…
We consider several aspects of `confining strings', recently proposed to describe the confining phase of gauge field theories. We perform the exact duality transformation that leads to the confining string action and show that it reduces to…
Cosmic strings in non-abelian gauge theories naturally gain a spectrum of massless, or light, excitations arising from their embedding in color and flavor space. This opens up the possibility that colliding strings miss each other in the…
We demonstrate that, due to the finite thickness of domain walls, and the consequent ambiguity in defining their locations, the effective string description obtained by integrating out bulk degrees of freedom contains ambiguities in the…
We present recent results on the spectrum of a confining flux tube that is closed around a spatial torus as a function of its length as well as the spectrum of glueballs. The extraction of the spectra has been realized by simulating four…
We discuss the unification of gauge couplings within the framework of a wide class of realistic free-fermionic string models which have appeared in the literature, including the flipped SU(5), SO(6)xSO(4), and various SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1)…
We measure the energy levels of the excitations of the flux tube between static quark and antiquark in three-dimensional SU(2) gauge theory. Combining exponential error reduction techniques and a variational method we are able to reduce the…
I begin these three lectures by describing some of the useful things that we have learned about large-N gauge theories using lattice simulations. For example that the theory is confining in that limit, that for many quantities SU(3) is…
Evidence from the lattice suggests that formation of a flux tube between a $q\bar{q}$ pair in the QCD vacuum leads to quark confinement. For large separations between the quarks, it is conjectured that the flux tube has a behaviour similar…
The percolating phase of whatever random percolation process resembles the confining vacuum of a gauge theory in most respects, with a string tension having a well-behaved continuum limit, a non trivial glueball spectrum and a deconfinement…
We study the flux tube thickness of a generic Lattice Gauge Theory near the deconfining phase transition. It is well known that the effective string model predicts a logarithmic increase of the flux tube thickness as a function of the…
We consider open strings in an external constant magnetic field $H$. For an (infinite) sequence of critical values of $H$ an increasing number of (highest spin component) states lying on the first Regge trajectory becomes tachyonic. In the…
A candidate for the confining string of gauge theories is constructed via a representation of the ultraviolet divergences of quantum field theory by a closed string dilaton insertion, computed through the soft dilaton theorem. The resulting…
We investigate the description of quark confinement in terms of confining strings or flux tubes. We show that compact QED with a topological $\theta$-term, in the dyon condensation phase, is described by a massive two-form field $B_{\mu…
The gauge invariance of cubic open superstring field theory is considered in a framework of level truncation, and applications to the tachyon condensation problem are discussed. As it is known, in the bosonic case the Feynman-Siegel gauge…
We discuss the classical continuum limit of the string field theory dual to the $\mathrm{SU}(N)$ lattice gauge theory and investigate various fundamental phenomena in the continuum theory at the mean-field level. Our construction of the…
We carry out lattice calculations of the spectrum of confining flux tubes that wind around a spatial torus of variable length l, in 2+1 dimensions. We compare the energies of the lowest c.30 states to the free string Nambu-Goto model and to…