Trigonometrically extended Cornell potential and deconfinement

TL;DR

This paper introduces a trigonometric extension of the Cornell potential, linking it to curved space symmetries and AdS/CFT correspondence, and demonstrates its effectiveness in describing baryon spectra and charge radii, with implications for quark deconfinement.

Contribution

The paper develops an exactly solvable trigonometric potential that extends the Cornell potential, connecting it to curved space symmetries and AdS/CFT, and applies it to baryon spectra.

Findings

Accurately describes nucleon and Delta spectra

Predicts proton charge radius

Suggests a curvature-dependent quark deconfinement transition

Abstract

Non-perturbative methods of effective field theory such like Lattice QCD have allowed to establish connection between the QCD Lagrangian and quark potential models, a prominent outcome being the Cornell (linear plus Coulomb) potential. In being quite successful in explaining properties of heavy flavor hadrons, be them quarkonia or baryons, this potential has been found less spectacular in the description of the non-strange baryons, the nucleon and the Delta. This behavior indicates that the one-gluon exchange and the flux-tube interaction do not fully account for the complexity of the dynamics of three light quarks. Very recently, the Cornell potential which is of infinte range has been upgraded by us toward an exactly solvable trigonometric potential of finite range that interpolates between the inverse-distance potential and the infinite wells while passing through a region of linear growth, a reason for which it contains the inverse distance and the linear potentials as first terms in its Taylor series decomposition. We here first make the point that the upgraded Cornell potential can be viewed as the exact counterpart on a curved space to a flat space 1/r potential, a circumstance that equips it by two simultaneous symmetries, SO(4), and SO(2,1). These allow to place the trigonometric confinement potential in the context of AdS_5/CFT correspondence and thus to establish the link of the algebraic aspects of the latter to QCD potentiology. Next we report that the above potential when employed in the quark-diquark system, provides a remarkably adequate description of both nucleon and Delta spectra and the proton mean square charge radius as well, and moreover implies an intriguing venue toward quark deconfinement as shut-down of the curvature considered as temperature dependent.