Yang-Mills Ground State in 2+1 Dimensions and Temporal Gauge

TL;DR

This paper proposes a gauge-invariant wavefunctional as an approximation to the Yang-Mills ground state in 2+1 dimensions, demonstrating confinement and providing numerical results for the mass gap.

Contribution

It introduces a new gauge-invariant wavefunctional for the Yang-Mills ground state in 2+1 dimensions and analyzes confinement through dimensional reduction.

Findings

The wavefunctional is the true ground state in free-field and strong-field limits.

Numerical results support the existence of a mass gap.

Confinement is explained via dimensional reduction.

Abstract

A gauge-invariant wavefunctional is proposed as an approximation to the ground state of Yang-Mills theory in 2+1 dimensions, quantized in temporal gauge. The proposed vacuum state is the true ground state of the appropriate Hamiltonian in both the free-field limit, and in a zero mode strong-field limit. Confinement, in this approach, arises via dimensional reduction, and we present numerical results for the mass gap. The issue of color screening is briefly discussed.