Hamiltonian approach to QCD in Coulomb gauge: From the vacuum to finite temperatures

TL;DR

This paper reviews the Hamiltonian approach to QCD in Coulomb gauge, focusing on vacuum properties, confinement, chiral symmetry breaking, and finite temperature phase transitions, with results matching lattice data.

Contribution

It introduces a Hamiltonian framework for finite temperature QCD and computes the deconfinement transition, providing new insights into the phase structure of the theory.

Findings

Confinement and chiral symmetry breaking mechanisms elucidated.

Deconfinement phase transition characterized for SU(2) and SU(3).

Predicted critical temperatures agree with lattice results.

Abstract

The variational Hamiltonian approach to QCD in Coulomb gauge is reviewed and the essential results obtained in recent years are summarized. First the results for the vacuum sector are discussed, with a special emphasis on the mechansim of confinement and chiral symmetry breaking. Then the deconfinement phase transition is described by introducing temperature in the Hamiltonian approach via compactification of one spatial dimension. The effective action for the Polyakov loop is calculated and the order of the phase transition as well as the critical temperatures are obtained for the color group SU(2) and SU(3). In both cases, our predictions are in good agreement with lattice calculations.