Observation of a Coulomb flux tube

Abstract

In Coulomb gauge there is a longitudinal color electric field associated with a static quark-antiquark pair. We have measured the spatial distribution of this field, and find that it falls off exponentially with transverse distance from a line joining the two quarks. In other words there is a Coulomb flux tube, with a width that is somewhat smaller than that of the minimal energy flux tube associated with the asymptotic string tension. A confinement criterion for gauge theories with matter fields is also proposed.

Comments: 8 pages, 4 figures. Talk presented at Lattice 2017, the 35th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, Granada, Spain, 18-24 June 2017