2024/08/16 by Sebastian M. Dawid, Wyatt A. Smith, Dawid, Sebastian M. +11 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Molecular Physics #Crystallography and Radiation Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Lattice (hep-lat) #Nuclear Theory (nucl-th) #Nuclear physics research studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2408.09007
openalex publication_date 2024/08/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
The Gribov--Zwanziger scenario attributes the phenomenon of confinement to the instantaneous interaction term in the QCD Hamiltonian in the Coulomb gauge. For a static quark-antiquark pair, it leads to a potential energy that increases linearly with the distance between them. Lattice studies of the SU(2) Yang--Mills theory determined the corresponding (Coulomb) string tension for sources in the fundamental representation, σC, to be about three times larger than the Wilson loop string tension, σF. It is far above the Zwanziger variational bound, σC ≥ σF. We argue that the value established in the literature is artificially inflated. We examine the lattice definition of the instantaneous potential, find the source of the string tension's enhancement, and perform its improved determination in SU(2) lattice gauge theory. We report our conservative estimate for the value of the Coulomb string tension as σC/σF = 2.0 ± 0.4 and discuss its phenomenological implications.