Chern-Simons-Schwinger model of confinement in $QCD$

TL;DR

This paper explores a higher-rank gauge field approach to understanding confinement in QCD, demonstrating a linear potential and charge-screening mechanism analogous to the Schwinger model.

Contribution

It introduces a Chern-Simons-Schwinger model with a 3-form gauge field to analytically derive the confinement potential in QCD.

Findings

The static potential includes a linear confining term.

The model reproduces the Schwinger mechanism of charge-screening.

Analytic form of the confinement potential in a generalized Schwinger model.

Abstract

It has been shown that the mechanism of formation of glue-bags in the strong coupling limit of Yang-Mills theory can be understood in terms of the dynamics of a higher-rank abelian gauge field, namely, the 3-form dual to the Chern-Simons topological current. Building on this result, we show that the field theoretical interpretation of the Chern-Simons term, as opposed to its topological interpretation, also leads to the analytic form of the confinement potential that arises in the large distance limit of $QCD$. In fact, for a $(3+1)$-dimensional generalization of the Schwinger model, we explicitly compute the interaction energy. This generalization is due to the presence of the topological gauge field $A_{\mu\nu\rho}$. Our results show that the static potential profile contains a linear term leading to the confinement of static probe charges. Once the quantum effects of the axial vector anomaly in $QCD$ are taken into account, the new gauge field and its matter-current counterpart provide an exact replica of the Schwinger mechanism of "charge-screening" that operates in $QED_2$.