The Baryon Junction and String Interactions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the properties of baryon junctions in confining string theories, revealing a predictive effective theory with minimal parameters and deriving interaction rules for closed strings, with implications for Yang-Mills theory.

Contribution

It introduces a simple effective theory for string junctions with a single new parameter and maps these to closed string interactions, providing new insights into string dynamics in gauge theories.

Findings

Effective theory of junctions controlled by junction mass

Derived interaction vertices for closed strings in Yang-Mills theory

Identified selection rules and stability constraints for string interactions

Abstract

We study junctions between confining strings. We show that the effective theory of such junctions is very predictive with only one new parameter, the junction's mass, controlling the first couple of terms in the expansion in the system size. By open-closed duality these considerations about the baryon junction map to interaction vertices of closed strings. Therefore, we calculate the interaction vertices of closed strings in theories such as Yang-Mills theory. We find some surprising selection rules for string interactions in 3+1 dimensions. Requiring perturbative stability and that the string coupling is weak, we suggest constraints on the junction's mass.