No confinement without Coulomb confinement

We compare the physical potential $V_D(R)$ of an external quark-antiquark pair in the representation $D$ of SU(N), to the color-Coulomb potential $V_{\rm coul}(R)$ which is the instantaneous part of the 44-component of the gluon propagator in Coulomb gauge, D_{44}(\vx,t) = V_{\rm coul}(|\vx|) \delta(t) + (non-instantaneous). We show that if $V_D(R)$ is confining, $\lim_{R \to \infty}V_D(R) = + \infty$, then the inequality $V_D(R) \leq - C_D V_{\rm coul}(R)$ holds asymptotically at large $R$, where $C_D > 0$ is the Casimir in the representation $D$. This implies that $- V_{\rm coul}(R)$ is also confining.Comment: 9 page

Aspects of Confinement: a Brief Review

A brief and biased overview of the phenomenon of confinement in QCD is presented in three parts: (1) the definition of confinement, (2) properties of confinement, (3) ideas of confinement. The second part chiefly consists of a brief review of recent lattice computations related to confinement while the third summarizes some of the current analytical approaches to understanding confinement. These include the Dyson-Schwinger formalism in Landau gauge, Hamiltonian QCD in Coulomb gauge, and the vortex picture of confinement.Comment: 10 pages, 6 eps figures. Plenary talk at Hadron 2003, Aschaffenburg, German

Perturbative Confinement

A Procedure is outlined that may be used as a starting point for a perturbative treatment of theories with permanent confinement. By using a counter term in the Lagrangian that renormalizes the infrared divergence in the Coulomb potential, it is achieved that the perturbation expansion at a finite value of the strong coupling constant may yield reasonably accurate properties of hadrons, and an expression for the string constant as a function of the QCD Lambda parameter.Comment: Presented at QCD'02, Montpellier, July 2002. 12 pages LaTeX, 8 Figures PostScript, uses gthstyle.sty Reprt-no: ITF-2002/39; SPIN-2002/2

Crystalline Confinement

We show that exotic phases arise in generalized lattice gauge theories known as quantum link models in which classical gauge fields are replaced by quantum operators. While these quantum models with discrete variables have a finite-dimensional Hilbert space per link, the continuous gauge symmetry is still exact. An efficient cluster algorithm is used to study these exotic phases. The $(2+1)$-d system is confining at zero temperature with a spontaneously broken translation symmetry. A crystalline phase exhibits confinement via multi-stranded strings between charge-anti-charge pairs. A phase transition between two distinct confined phases is weakly first order and has an emergent spontaneously broken approximate $SO(2)$ global symmetry. The low-energy physics is described by a $(2+1)$-d $\mathbb{R}P(1)$ effective field theory, perturbed by a dangerously irrelevant $SO(2)$ breaking operator, which prevents the interpretation of the emergent pseudo-Goldstone boson as a dual photon. This model is an ideal candidate to be implemented in quantum simulators to study phenomena that are not accessible using Monte Carlo simulations such as the real-time evolution of the confining string and the real-time dynamics of the pseudo-Goldstone boson.Comment: Proceedings of the 31st International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory - LATTICE 201

Structure of the confining solutions for SU(3)-Yang-Mills equations and confinement mechanism

Structure of exact solutions modelling confinement is discussed for SU(3)-Yang-Mills equations and uniqueness of such confining solutions is proved in a certain sense. Relationship of the obtained results to QCD and the confinement mechanism is considered. Incidentally the Wilson confinement criterion for the found solutions is verified and also numerical estimates for strength of magnetic colour field responsible for linear confinement are adduced in the ground state of charmonium.Comment: 16 pages, LaTe