The static PQCD potential with modified boundary conditions

Abstract

We calculate the potential between two static quarks in QCD using modified boundary conditions for the perturbative expansion. Through a change of the Feynman iepsilon prescription we effectively add a "sea" of gluons to the asymptotic states with energies below a given scale Lambda. We find that the standard result for the static potential gets corrections of order Lambda^2/Q^2 both at small and large momentum transfers Q^2. After resummation of the infrared sensitive corrections we find that the running coupling alpha_s(Q^2) freezes in the infrared and that the exchanged gluon gets an effective tachyonic mass. We verify that identical results are obtained in the Coulomb and Feynman gauges.

Comments: 13 pages, 3 figures, updated version accepted for publication in JHEP, additions to introduction and discussion, references added, results unchanged