Static quark anti-quark pair in SU(2) gauge theory

TL;DR

This paper investigates the behavior of static quark-antiquark pairs in SU(2) gauge theory at finite temperature, revealing the non-perturbative mixing of singlet and triplet states and their temperature-dependent correlators.

Contribution

It provides a non-perturbative analysis of singlet and triplet correlation functions in SU(2) gauge theory using advanced lattice techniques at low temperatures.

Findings

Naive separation of singlet and triplet states does not hold non-perturbatively.

Singlet and triplet correlators show distinct temperature dependence.

The expected separation is recovered at small quark-antiquark distances.

Abstract

We study singlet and triplet correlation functions of static quark anti-quark pair defined through gauge invariant time-like Wilson loops and Polyakov loop correlators in finite temperature SU(2) gauge theory. We use the Luescher-Weisz multilevel algorithm, which allows to calculate these correlators at very low temperatures. We observe that the naive separation of singlet and triplet states in general does not hold non-perturbatively, however, is recovered in the limit of small separation and the temperature dependence of the corresponding correlators is indeed very different.