Retardation Terms in The One-Gluon Exchange Potential

Abstract

It is pointed out that the retardation terms given in the original Fermi-Breit potential vanish in the center of mass frame. The retarded one-gluon exchange potential is rederived in this paper from the three-dimensional one-gluon exchange kernel which appears in the exact three-dimensional relativistic equation for quark-antiquark bound states. The retardation part of the potential given in the approximation of order $p^2/m^2$ is shown to be different from those derived in the previous literature. This part is off-shell and does no longer vanish in the center of mass frame.