A Gauge-Independent Mechanism for Confinement and Mass Gap: Part I -- The General Framework

Abstract

We propose a gauge-independent mechanism for the area-law behavior of Wilson loop expectation values in terms of worldsheets spanning Wilson loops interacting with the spin foams that contribute to the vacuum partition function. The method uses an exact transformation of lattice-regularized Yang-Mills theory that is valid for all couplings. Within this framework, some natural conjectures can be made as to what physical mechanism enforces the confinement property in the continuum (weak coupling) limit. Details for the SU(2) case in three dimensions are provided in a companion paper.

16 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Approaches to the sign problem in lattice field theory
• Dual lattice representations for O(N) and CP(N-1) models with a chemical potential
• Abelian color cycles: a new approach to strong coupling expansion and dual representations for non-abelian lattice gauge theory
• A Gauge-Independent Mechanism for Confinement and Mass Gap: Part II -- G=SU(2) and D=3