Heavy quark potential from QCD-related effective coupling

TL;DR

This paper develops a non-perturbative QCD-inspired coupling to derive a quark-antiquark potential that accurately models both asymptotic freedom and confinement, successfully predicting bottomonium and charmonium spectra.

Contribution

It introduces a gluon mass function-based coupling to derive a potential that captures key QCD features and matches experimental meson spectra.

Findings

The potential satisfies asymptotic freedom and linear confinement.

Predicted meson spectra agree well with experimental data.

A small parameter range yields optimal results.

Abstract

We implement our past investigations in the quark-antiquark interaction through a non-perturbative running coupling defined in terms of a gluon mass function, similar to that used in some Schwinger-Dyson approaches. This coupling leads to a quark-antiquark potential, which satisfies not only asymptotic freedom but also describes linear confinement correctly. From this potential, we calculate the bottomonium and charmonium spectra below the first open flavor meson-meson thresholds and show that for a small range of values of the free parameter determining the gluon mass function an excellent agreement with data is attained.