The spectrum of closed loops of fundamental flux in D = 3+1 SU(N) gauge theories

TL;DR

This study investigates the spectrum of closed flux tubes in 4D SU(N) gauge theories, finding strong agreement with Nambu-Goto string predictions for most states, while identifying some deviations that could inform effective string theory models.

Contribution

The paper provides a detailed spectral analysis of flux tubes in 4D SU(N) gauge theories using a large operator basis and compares results with effective string theories, highlighting where NG predictions succeed or fail.

Findings

Most flux tube states agree with Nambu-Goto predictions.

Some states with negative parity deviate significantly from NG.

Results suggest effective string theories can be re-summed for better accuracy.

Abstract

We study the spectrum of closed flux tubes in four dimensional SU(N) gauge theories. We do so by calculating the energies of the low lying states with the variational technique (whose basis consists of about ~700 operators). We study states of different values of angular momentum, transversal parity, longitudinal parity, and longitudinal momentum, and compare the results with effective string theories (ESTs) such as the Nambu-Goto (NG) model. Most of our states agree very well with the Nambu-Goto predictions and since most of our flux-tubes' lengths are outside the radius of convergence of the ESTs, then for some states it is only the NG that predicts the spectrum well. This strongly suggests that the ESTs can be re-summed. Nonetheless, there are a few states (all with negative parity and in the same representation of the lattice rotation group) that exhibit large deviations from the NG predictions; these deviations might provide clues to the nature of the effective string theory describing the large-N QCD string.