Colour-electric and colour-magnetic confinement

TL;DR

This paper investigates the temperature-dependent confinement properties in QCD using the Field Correlator Method, revealing how spatial and temporal string tensions behave differently with temperature and align with lattice data.

Contribution

It demonstrates the connection between string tensions and vacuum gluon energies, providing a unified framework for understanding confinement at finite temperature.

Findings

Spatial string tension increases with temperature.

Temporal string tension vanishes at deconfinement temperature.

Results agree well with lattice QCD data.

Abstract

The basic properties of the confinement mechanism in QCD -- the temperature dependence of the spatial and temporal string tensions ($\sigma_s(T)$ and $\sigma_E(T)$) -- are studied in the framework of the Field Correlator Method (FCM). It is shown that both functions are connected respectively to the spatial and temporal parts of the vacuum gluon energy $\epsilon_s$ and $\epsilon_E$ which define their equal values at $T=0$. However at $T>0$ the spatial part is growing with $T$ while the temporal part is destroyed by the hadronic pressure at $T=T_c$ (the deconfinement). Both properties are derived within the same method and are in a good agreement with the corresponding lattice data.