Effective Theories of Confinement

TL;DR

This paper reviews effective field theories for confinement, focusing on lattice analysis of a generalized Faddeev-Niemi action that predicts a mass gap of about 1.5 GeV in SU(2) gluodynamics.

Contribution

It extends the Faddeev-Niemi effective action to include all relevant operators with symmetry breaking, providing new insights into the mass gap in confinement.

Findings

Mass gap of approximately 1.5 GeV identified

Generalized effective action includes all operators with O(3) symmetry

Lattice analysis supports the effective theory's relevance

Abstract

We review some approaches to describe confinement in terms of effective (model) field theories. After a brief discussion of the dual Abelian Higgs model, we concentrate on a lattice analysis of the Faddeev-Niemi effective action conjectured to describe the low-lying excitations of SU(2) gluodynamics. We generalize the effective action such that it contains all operators built from a unit color vector field n with O(3) symmetry and maximally four derivatives. To avoid the presence of Goldstone bosons, we include explicit symmetry breaking terms parametrized by an external field h of mass-dimension two. We find a mass gap of the order of 1.5 GeV.