Is the ground state of Yang-Mills theory Coulombic?

Abstract

We study trial states modelling the heavy quark-antiquark ground state in SU(2) Yang-Mills theory. A state describing the flux tube between quarks as a thin string of glue is found to be a poor description of the continuum ground state; the infinitesimal thickness of the string leads to UV artifacts which suppress the overlap with the ground state. Contrastingly, a state which surrounds the quarks with non-abelian Coulomb fields is found to have a good overlap with the ground state for all charge separations. In fact, the overlap increases as the lattice regulator is removed. This opens up the possibility that the Coulomb state is the true ground state in the continuum limit.

10 pages, 9 .eps figures

References in corpus (6)

• Confining Solution of the Dyson-Schwinger Equations in Coulomb Gauge
• Infrared analysis of propagators and vertices of Yang--Mills theory in Landau and Coulomb gauge
• Properties of Color-Coulomb String Tension
• Probing the ground state in gauge theories
• Coulomb gauge Gribov copies and the confining potential
• Improved actions and asymptotic scaling in lattice Yang-Mills theory

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Fluctuations of the baryonic flux-tube junction from effective string theory
• Unparticle actions and gauge invariance
• The ice-limit of Coulomb gauge Yang-Mills theory
• On the ground state of Yang-Mills theory