Effect of Virtual Pairs on the Inter-quark Potential

TL;DR

This paper investigates how virtual light quark pairs influence the inter-quark potential in QCD, revealing a confining potential when such pairs are included in the variational analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a reformulated Hamiltonian approach with a trial state including virtual pairs to study the quark-antiquark potential.

Findings

The potential shows confining behavior with virtual pairs included.

The variational method captures non-perturbative effects.

The approach provides insights into quark confinement mechanisms.

Abstract

We use the variational method, in a reformulated Hamiltonian formalism of QCD, to derive the wave equation for a heavy quark-antiquark system using a trial state that contains a component with a virtual light quark pair. We examine the quark-antiquark potential in the non-relativistic limit using an approximate trial ground-state wave function. We find that the potential exhibits a confining character due to the inclusion of the virtual pair component in the trial state.