No Arabic abstract
A natural explanation of confinement can be given in terms of symmetry. Since color symmetry is exact, the candidate symmetry is dual and related to homotopy,i.e., in (3+1)d, to magnetic charge conservation. A set of r abelian tHooft-like tensors (r = rank of the gauge group) can be defined and the dual charge is a violation of the corresponding Bianchi identities. It is shown that this is equivalently described by non-abelian Bianchi identities.
Some aspects are discussed of the mechanism of color confinement in QCD by condensation of magnetic monopoles in the vacuum.
We propose a new lattice framework to extract the relevant gluonic energy scale of QCD phenomena which is based on a cut on link variables in momentum space. This framework is expected to be broadly applicable to all lattice QCD calculations. Using this framework, we quantitatively determine the relevant energy scale of color confinement, through the analyses of the quark-antiquark potential and meson masses. The relevant energy scale of color confinement is found to be below 1.5 GeV in the Landau gauge. In fact, the string tension is almost unchanged even after cutting off the high-momentum gluon component above 1.5 GeV. When the relevant low-energy region is cut, the quark-antiquark potential is approximately reduced to a Coulomb-like potential, and each meson becomes a quasi-free quark pair. As an analytical model calculation, we also investigate the dependence of the Richardson potential on the cut, and find the consistent behavior with the lattice result.
We study color confinement properties of the multi-instanton system, which seems to carry an essence of the nonperturbative QCD vacuum. Here we assume that the multi-instanton system is characterized by the infrared suppression of instantons as $f(rho)sim rho^{-5}$ for large size $rho$. We first investigate a monopole-clustering appearing in the maximally abelian (MA) gauge by considering the correspondence between instantons and monopoles. In order to clarify the infrared monopole properties, we make the ``block-spin transformation for monopole currents. The feature of monopole trajectories changes drastically with the instanton density. At a high instanton density, there appears one very long and highly complicated monopole loop covering the entire physical vacuum. Such a global network of long-monopole loops resembles the lattice QCD result in the MA gauge. Second, we observe that the SU(2) Wilson loop obeys an area law and the static quark potential is approximately proportional to the distance $R$ between quark and anti-quark in the multi-instanton system using the SU(2) lattice with a total volume of $V=(10 fm)^4$ and a lattice spacing of $a=0.05 fm$. We extract the string tension from the $5 times 10^{6}$ measurements of Wilson loops. With an instanton density of $(N/V)=(1/fm)^4$ and a average instanton size of $bar{rho}=0.4 fm$, the multi-instanton system provides the string tension of about $0.4 GeV/fm$.
We relate quark confinement, as measured by the Polyakov-loop order parameter, to color confinement, as described by the Kugo-Ojima/Gribov-Zwanziger scenario. We identify a simple criterion for quark confinement based on the IR behaviour of ghost and gluon propagators, and compute the order-parameter potential from the knowledge of Landau-gauge correlation functions with the aid of the functional RG. Our approach predicts the deconfinement transition in quenched QCD to be of first order for SU(3) and second order for SU(2) -- in agreement with general expectations. As an estimate for the critical temperature, we obtain T_c=284MeV for SU(3).
We propose a unified description of two important phenomena: color confinement in large-$N$ gauge theory, and Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC). We focus on the confinement/deconfinement transition characterized by the increase of the entropy from $N^0$ to $N^2$, which persists in the weak coupling region. Indistinguishability associated with the symmetry group -- SU($N$) or O($N$) in gauge theory, and S$_N$ permutations in the system of identical bosons -- is crucial for the formation of the condensed (confined) phase. We relate standard criteria, based on off-diagonal long range order (ODLRO) for BEC and the Polyakov loop for gauge theory. The constant offset of the distribution of the phases of the Polyakov loop corresponds to ODLRO, and gives the order parameter for the partially-(de)confined phase at finite coupling. We demonstrate this explicitly for several quantum mechanical systems (i.e., theories at small or zero spatial volume) at weak coupling, and argue that this mechanism extends to large volume and/or strong coupling. This viewpoint may have implications for confinement at finite $N$, and for quantum gravity via gauge/gravity duality.