We investigate the string breaking mechanism in n_f=2 QCD. We discuss the lattice techniques used and present results on energy levels and mixing angle of the static BBbar|QbarQ two-state system. The string breaking is visualized, by means of an animation of the action density distribution as a function of the static colour source-antisource separation.
We present a model for string breaking based on the existence of chromoelectric flux tubes. We predict the form of the long-range potential, and obtain an estimate of the string breaking length. A prediction is also obtained for the behaviour with temperature of the string breaking length near the deconfinement phase transition. We plan to use this model as a guide for a program of study of string breaking on the lattice.
The first observation is made of hadronic string breaking due to dynamical fermions in zero temperature lattice QCD. The simulations are done for SU(2) color in three dimensions, with two flavors of staggered fermions. The results have clear implications for the large scale simulations that are being done to search (so far, without success) for string breaking in four-dimensional QCD. In particular, string breaking is readily observed using only Wilson loops to excite a static quark-antiquark pair. Improved actions on coarse lattices are used, providing an extremely efficient means to access the quark separations and propagation times at which string breaking occurs.
The separation of a heavy quark and antiquark pair leads to the formation of a tube of flux, or string, which should break in the presence of light quark-antiquark pairs. This expected zero temperature phenomenon has proven elusive in simulations of lattice QCD. We present simulation results that show that the string does break in the confining phase at nonzero temperature.
The separation of a heavy quark and antiquark pair leads to the formation of a tube of flux, or string, which should break in the presence of light quark-antiquark pairs. This expected zero-temperature phenomenon has proven elusive in simulations of lattice QCD. We study mixing between the string state and the two-meson decay channel in QCD with two flavors of dynamical sea quarks. We confirm that mixing is weak and find that it decreases at level crossing. While our study does not show direct effects of internal quark loops, our results, combined with unitarity, give clear confirmation of string breaking.
An uncontroversial observation of adjoint string breaking is proposed, while measuring the static potential from Wilson loops only. The overlap of the Wilson loop with the broken-string state is small, but non-vanishing, so that the broken-string groundstate can be seen if the Wilson loop is long enough. We demonstrate this in the context of the (2+1)d SU(2) adjoint static potential, using an improved version of the Luscher-Weisz exponential variance reduction. To complete the picture we perform the more usual multichannel analysis with two basis states, the unbroken-string state and the broken-string state (two so-called gluelumps). As by-products, we obtain the temperature-dependent static potential measured from Polyakov loop correlations, and the fundamental SU(2) static potential with improved accuracy. Comparing the latter with the adjoint potential, we see clear deviations from Casimir scaling.