Spectral sum for the color-Coulomb potential in SU(3) Coulomb gauge lattice Yang-Mills theory

Abstract

We discuss the essential role of the low-lying eigenmodes of the Faddeev-Popov (FP) ghost operator on the confining color-Coulomb potential using SU(3) quenched lattice simulations in the Coulomb gauge. The color-Coulomb potential is expressed as a spectral sum of the FP ghost operator and has been explored by partially summing the FP eigenmodes. We take into account the Gribov copy effects that have a great impact on the FP eigenvalues and the color-Coulomb potential. We observe that the lowest eigenvalue vanishes in the thermodynamic limit much faster than that in the Landau gauge. The color-Coulomb potential at large distances is governed by the near-zero FP eigenmodes; in particular, the lowest one accounts for a substantial portion of the color-Coulomb string tension comparable to the Wilson string tension.

Comments: 14 pages, 14 figures