Hamiltonian Approach to QCD: The effective potential of the Polyakov loop

The effective potential of the order parameter for confinement is calculated within the Hamiltonian approach to Yang--Mills theory. Compactifying one spatial dimension and using a background gauge fixing this potential is obtained by minimizing the energy density for a given background field. Using Gaussian type trial wave functionals I establish an analytic relation between the propagators in the background gauge at finite temperature and the corresponding zero temperature propagators in Coulomb gauge. In the simplest truncation, neglecting the ghost and using the ultraviolet form of the gluon energy one recovers the Weiss potential. From the fully non-perturbative potential (with the ghost included) one extracts a critical temperature of the deconfinement phase transition of 270 MeV for the gauge group SU(2).Comment: 8 pages, 6 eps figures. Talk given by Hugo Reinhardt at Xth Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum, October 8--12, 2012 TUM Campus Garching, Munich, German

The effective potential of the confinement order parameter in the Hamiltonian approach

The effective potential of the order parameter for confinement is calculated for SU(N) Yang--Mills theory in the Hamiltonian approach. Compactifying one spatial dimension and using a background gauge fixing, this potential is obtained within a variational approach by minimizing the energy density for given background field. In this formulation the inverse length of the compactified dimension represents the temperature. Using Gaussian trial wave functionals we establish an analytic relation between the propagators in the background gauge at finite temperature and the corresponding zero-temperature propagators in Coulomb gauge. In the simplest truncation, neglecting the ghost and using the ultraviolet form of the gluon energy, we recover the Weiss potential. We explicitly show that the omission of the ghost drastically increases the transition temperature. From the full non-perturbative potential (with the ghost included) we extract a critical temperature of the deconfinement phase transition of 269 MeV for the gauge group SU(2) and 283 MeV for SU(3).Comment: 26 pages, 17 eps figure

Hamiltonian Dyson--Schwinger Equations of QCD

The general method for treating non-Gaussian wave functionals in the Hamiltonian formulation of a quantum field theory, which was previously developed and applied to Yang--Mills theory in Coulomb gauge, is generalized to full QCD. The Hamiltonian Dyson-Schwinger equations as well as the quark and gluon gap equations are derived and analysed in the IR and UV momentum regime. The back-reaction of the quarks on the gluon sector is investigated.Comment: 7 pages, 3 eps figures. Talk given by D. Campagnari at Xth Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum, October 8--12, 2012 TUM Campus Garching, Munich, German