We bootstrap the S-matrix of massless particles in unitary, relativistic two dimensional quantum field theories. We find that the low energy expansion of such S-matrices is strongly constrained by the existence of a UV completion. In the context of flux tube physics, this allows us to constrain several terms in the S-matrix low energy expansion or -- equivalently -- on Wilson coefficients of several irrelevant operators showing up in the flux tube effective action. These bounds have direct implications for other physical quantities; for instance, they allow us to further bound the ground state energy as well as the level splitting of degenerate energy levels of large flux tubes. We find that the S-matrices living at the boundary of the allowed space exhibit an intricate pattern of resonances with one sharper resonance whose quantum numbers, mass and width are precisely those of the world-sheet axion proposed in [1,2]. The general method proposed here should be extendable to massless S-matrices in higher dimensions and should lead to new quantitative bounds on irrelevant operators in theories of Goldstones and also in gauge and gravity theories.
We develop a bootstrap approach to Effective Field Theories (EFTs) based on the concept of duality in optimisation theory. As a first application, we consider the fascinating set of EFTs for confining flux tubes. The outcome of our analysis are optimal bounds on the scattering amplitude of Goldstone excitations of the flux tube, which in turn translate into bounds on the Wilson coefficients of the EFT action. Finally, we comment on how our approach compares to EFT positivity bounds.
In this work we investigate the effect of an external magnetic field B on the shape of flux tubes in QCD by means of lattice simulations, performed with N_f=2+1 flavors of stout improved dynamical staggered quarks with physical masses. After having discussed some difficulties in the practical definition of the flux tube at B=0, we show that these ambiguities do not affect the determination of the flux tube modifications induced by the magnetic field. Different results are obtained depending on the relative orientations of the flux tube and of the magnetic field: they confirm that the magnetic …
We revisit Nambu's model of quark confinement by a tube of magnetic flux, with two additional features. The quarks are taken to be magnetic monopoles external to the tube, which seal the ends, and are also taken to be fermions. This ensures that the model is inconsistent unless there are at least two species of fermions being confined.
Recent lattice results for the energy of gluonic excitations as a function of quark separation are shown to correspond to transverse relativistic flux tube vibration modes. For large quark separations all states appear to degenerate into a few categories which are predicted uniquely, given the ground state.
We propose a new approach for the calculation of the spectrum of excitations of QCD flux tubes. It relies on the fact that the worldsheet theory is integrable at low energies. With this approach, energy levels can be calculated for much shorter flux tubes than was previously possible, allowing for a quantitative comparison with existing lattice data. The improved theoretical control makes it manifest that existing lattice data provides strong evidence for a new pseudoscalar particle localized on the QCD fluxtube - the worldsheet axion.
The emergence of flux-tubes as the distance is increased between a quark and an antiquark is explored in a three-dimensional confining gauge theory using the gauge/gravity duality. We delineate the shape of the flux-tube corresponding to the classical open string in the bulk and further explore the fluctuation in its thickness induced by the fluctuation of the open string along the radial direction in the bulk. The relationship between the intrinsic shape of a flux-tube and its effect on the heavy quark potential is also discussed.
Effective magnetic $SU(N)$ gauge theory with classical $Z_N$ flux tubes of intrinsic width $\frac{1}{M}$ is an effective field theory of the long distance quark-antiquark interaction in $SU(N)$ Yang-Mills theory. Long wavelength fluctuations of the $Z_N$ vortices of this theory lead to an effective string theory. In this paper we clarify the connection between effective field theory and effective string theory and we propose a new constraint on these vortices. We first examine the impact of string fluctuations on the classical dual superconductor description of confinement. At inter-quark dist…
We describe flux tubes and their interactions in a low energy sigma model induced by $SU(\NF) \goto SO(\NF)$ flavor symmetry breaking in $SO(N_c)$ QCD. Gauge confinement manifests itself in the low energy theory through flux tube interactions with unscreened sources. The flux tubes which mediate confinement also illustrate an interesting ambiguity in defining global Alice strings.
We consider non-Abelian SU(3) Proca theory with a Higgs scalar field included. Cylindrically symmetric solutions describing classical tubes either with the flux of a longitudinal electric field or with the energy flux (and hence with nonzero momentum density) are obtained. It is shown that, in quantum Proca theory, there can exist tubes both with the flux of the longitudinal electric field and with the energy flux/momentum density simultaneously. An imaginary particle -- Proca proton~-- in which `quarks' are connected by tubes with nonzero momentum density is considered. It is shown that this …
The flux tube solution in the Euclidean spacetime with the color longitudinal electric field in the SU(2) Yang - Mills - Higgs theory with broken gauge symmetry is found. Some arguments is given that this flux tube is a pure quantum object in the SU(3) quantum theory reduced to the SU(2) Yang - Mills - Higgs theory.
It is argued that the phenomenon of a flux tube in quantum chromodynamics is closely connected with a spontaneously symmetry breakdown of gauge theory. It is shown that in the presence of a mass term in the SU(2) gauge theory the Nielsen-Olesen equations describe the flux tube surrounded by an external field.
We describe flux tubes and their interactions in a low energy sigma model induced by $SU({N_f}) \rightarrow SO({N_f})$ flavor symmetry breaking in $SO(N_c)$ QCD. Unlike standard QCD, this model allows gauge confinement to manifest itself in the low energy theory, which has unscreened spinor color sources and global $Z_2$ flux tubes. We construct the flux tubes and show how they mediate the confinement of spinor sources. We further examine the flux tubes' quantum stability, spectrum and interactions. We find that flux tubes are Alice strings, despite ambiguities in defining parallel transport. …
It is shown that in the SU(2) Yang - Mills - Higgs theory with broken gauge symmetry a flux tube solution filled with a color longitudinal electric field exists. The origin of the gauge symmetry breakdown for this case is discussed.
In this article we obtain the energy spectrum of colored, spinor particles in chromoelectric flux tubes. The chromoelectric field of the flux tubes considered here comes from {\em simply} constant gauge potentials rather than from covariantly constant gauge potential, as is usually the case. The energy spectrum of the simply constant flux tubes is different than that of the covariantly constant flux tubes. The spectrum is discrete due to the walls of the tube and with a plus/minus constant shift depending on the magnitude of the constant chromoelectric background. This goes against the classic…
The Nielsen - Olesen flux tube in the SU(2) Yang - Mills - Higgs theory dressed with the color electric $E^a_{ρ,ϕ}$ and magnetic $H^a_{ρ,ϕ}$ fields is derived. On the next step it is argued that this flux tube can be considered as a result of the nonperturbatuve analytical calculations in the SU(3) quantum theory.
We review the current knowledge about the theoretical foundations of the effective string theory for confining flux tubes and the comparison of the predictions to pure gauge lattice data. A concise presentation of the effective string theory is provided, incorporating recent developments. We summarize the predictions for the spectrum and the profile/width of the flux tube and their comparison to lattice data. The review closes with a short summary of open questions for future research.
We consider the three dimensional SU(2) Yang-Mills theory with adjoint static color sources, studying by lattice simulations how the shape of the flux tube changes when increasing the distance between them. The disappearance of the flux tube at string breaking is quite abrupt, but precursors of this phenomenon are present already when the separation between the sources is smaller than its critical value, a fact that influences also some details of the static potential.
We calculate, numerically, the low-lying spectrum of closed confining flux tubes that carry flux in different representations of SU(N). We do so for SU(6) at beta=171, where the calculated low-energy physics is very close to the continuum limit and, in many respects, also close to N=infinity. We focus on the adjoint, 84, 120, k=2A,2S and k=3A,3M,3S representations and provide evidence that the corresponding flux tubes, albeit mostly unstable, do in fact exist. We observe that the ground state of a flux tube with momentum along its axis appears to be well defined in all cases and is well descri…
Simulations in lattice gauge theory suggest that the formation of a flux tube between quark and antiquark leads to quark confinement. It is conjectured that the infrared behaviour of the flux tube is governed by an effective string theory and simulations show good agreement between lattice data and its predictions. To next-to leading order ($R^{-3}$) in the inverse $q\bar{q}$ separation $R$ the effective string theory is equivalent to Nambu-Goto string theory. For the open flux tube in three dimensions corrections appear at order $R^{-4}$. We compare these predictions to high-accuracy measurem…
We extend our earlier calculations of the spectrum of closed flux tubes in SU(N) gauge theories in 2+1 dimensions, with a focus on questions raised by recent theoretical progress on the effective string action of long flux tubes and the world-sheet action for flux tubes of moderate lengths. Our new calculations in SU(4) and SU(8) provide evidence that the leading O(1/l^gamma) non-universal correction to the flux tube ground state energy does indeed have a power gamma greater than or equal to 7. We perform a study in SU(2), where we can traverse the length at which the Nambu-Goto ground state b…
We investigate whether one can observe in SO(3) and SO(4) (lattice) gauge theories the presence of spinorial flux tubes, i.e. ones that correspond to the fundamental representation of SU(2); and similarly for SO(6) and SU(4). We do so by calculating the finite volume dependence of the JP=2+ glueball in 2+1 dimensions, using lattice simulations. We show how this provides strong evidence that these SO(N) gauge theories contain states that are composed of pairs of (conjugate) winding spinorial flux tubes, i.e. ones that are in the (anti)fundamental of the corresponding SU(N') gauge theories. More…
We compute energies and energy densities of static electromagnetic flux tubes in three and four spacetime dimensions. Our calculation uses scattering data from the potential induced by the flux tube and imposes standard perturbative renormalization conditions. The calculation is exact to one-loop order, with no additional approximation adopted. We embed the flux tube in a configuration with zero total flux so that we can fully apply standard results from scattering theory. We find that upon choosing the same on-shell renormalization conditions, the functional dependence of the energy and energ…
In this work we perform an investigation of the flux tube between two static color sources in four dimensional $SU(3)$ Yang-Mills theory, using the so called connected correlator. Contrary to most previous studies we do not use any smoothing algorithm to facilitate the evaluation of the correlator, that is performed using only stochastically exact techniques. We first examine the renormalization properties of the connected operator, then we present our numerical data for the longitudinal chromoelectric component of the flux tube, that are used to extract the dual superconductivity parameters.
We study the flux tube thickness of a generic Lattice Gauge Theory near the deconfining phase transition. It is well known that the effective string model predicts a logarithmic increase of the flux tube thickness as a function of the interquark distance for any confining LGT at zero temperature. It is perhaps less known that this same model predicts a linear increase in the vicinity of the deconfinement transition. We present a precise derivation of this result and compare it with a set of high precision simulations in the case of the 3d gauge Ising model.
The long range properties of four-dimensional compact U(1) lattice gauge theory with the Wilson action in the confinement phase is studied by using the multi-level algorithm. The static potential, force and flux-tube profile between two static charges are successfully measured from the correlation function involving the Polyakov loop. The universality of the coefficient of the 1/r correction to the static potential, known as the Luescher term, and the transversal width of the flux-tube profile as a function of its length are investigated. While the result supports the presence of the 1/r corre…
A perfectly reflecting (Dirichlet) boundary condition at the edge of an impenetrable magnetic-flux-carrying tube of nonzero transverse size is imposed on the charged massive scalar matter field which is quantized outside the tube on a plane which is transverse to the tube. We show that the vacuum polarization effects outside the tube give rise to a macroscopic force acting at the increase of the tube radius (if the magnetic flux is held steady).
We use the worldline numerics technique to study a cylindrically symmetric model of magnetic flux tubes in a dense lattice and the non-local Casimir forces acting between regions of magnetic flux. Within a superconductor the magnetic field is constrained within magnetic flux tubes and if the background magnetic field is on the order the quantum critical field strength, $B_k = \frac{m^2}{e} = 4.4 \times 10^{13}$ Gauss, the magnetic field is likely to vary rapidly on the scales where \acs{QED} effects are important. In this paper, we construct a cylindrically symmetric toy model of a flux tube l…
In this talk I present recent studies on vacuum polarization energies and energy densities induced by QED flux tubes. I focus on comparing three and four dimensional scenarios and the discussion of various approximation schemes in view of the exact treatment.
We calculate dimensional reduction of gravitational flux tube solutions in the scheme of Kaluza-Klein theory. The fifth dimension is compacified to a region of Planck size. Assuming the width of the tube to be also Planck size we obtain string-like object with physical fields originated from an initial 5D metric. The dynamics of these fields is inner one.
Spherically symmetric, vacuum solutions in 5D and 7D Kaluza-Klein theory are obtained. These solutions are flux tubes with constant cross-sectional size, located between (+) and (-) Kaluza-Klein's ``electrical'' and ``magnetic'' charges disposed respectively at $\pm\infty$ and filled by constant Kaluza-Klein ``electrical'' and ``magnetic'' fields. These objects are surprisingly similar to the flux tubes which forms between two monopoles in Type-II superconductors and also the hypothesized color field flux tube that is thought to form between two quarks in the QCD vacuum.
By studying multidimensional Kaluza-Klein theories, or gravity plus U(1) or SU(2) gauge fields it is shown that these theories possess similar flux tube solutions. The gauge field which fills the tube geometry of these solutions leads to a comparision with the flux tube structures in QCD. These solutions also carry a ``magnetic'' charge, Q, which for the SU(2) Einstein-Yang-Mills (EYM) system exhibits a dual relationship with the Yang-Mills gauge coupling, g, ($Q=1/g$). As $Q \to 0$ or $Q \to \infty$, $g \to \infty$ or $g \to 0$ respectively. Thus within this classical EYM field theory we find…
We apply the Callan-Harvey anomaly inflow mechanism to the study of QCD (chromoelectric) flux tubes, quark (pair)-creation and chiral magnetic effect, using new variables from the Cho-Faddeev-Niemi decomposition of the gauge potential. A phenomenological description of chromoelectric flux tubes is obtained by studying a gauged Nambu-Jona-Lasinio effective Lagrangian, derived from the original QCD Lagrangian. At the quantum level, quark condensates in the QCD vacuum may form a vortex-like structure in a chromoelectric flux tube. Quark zero modes trapped in the vortex are chiral and lead to a tw…
We derive nonperturbative classical solutions of noncommutative U(1) gauge theory, with or without a Higgs field, representing static magnetic flux tubes with arbitrary cross-section. The fields are nonperturbatively different from the vacuum in at least some region of space. The flux of these tubes is quantized in natural units. We also point out that magnetic monopole charge can be fractionized by embedding the monopoles in a constant magnetic field.
QCD is expected to be in the color-flavor locking phase in high baryon density, which exhibits color superconductivity. The most fundamental topological objects in the color superconductor are non-Abelian vortices which are topologically stable color magnetic flux tubes. We present numerical solutions of the color magnetic flux tube for diverse choices of the coupling constants. We also analytically study its asymptotic profiles and find that they are different from the case of usual superconductors. We propose the width of color magnetic fluxes and find that it is larger than naive expectatio…
A finite-length magnetic vortex line solution is derived within the context of (4-dim) dilaton gravity. We approach the Bonnor metric at the Einstein-Maxwell limit, and encounter the "flux tube as (Euclidean) Kerr horizon" at the Kaluza-Klein level. Exclusively for string theory, the magnetic flux tube world-sheet exhibits a 2-dim black & white dihole structure. (The figure has been cut off, and is now available upon request from davidson@bguvms.bgu.ac.il)
I describe Field/String duality as applied to the response of gauge fields to separated quark and antiquark sources. This is a talk contributed to the conference Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum VII, Ponta Delgada, Azores, 2-7 September 2006.
In Refs. [3,1] two different approaches have been developed for the numerical computation of the effective energy in the presence of a magnetic flux tube, by using the phase shift method. However, the opinion has been expressed that these two variations of the phase shift method are not equivalent. In this paper we aim to solve this ambiguity by comparing these two different approaches and showing that they give identical numerical results, within the numerical accuracy of the method.
We consider correlator of two concentric Wilson loops, a small and large ones related to the problem of flux-tube formation. There are three mechanisms which can contribute to the connected correlator and yield different dependences on the radius of the small loop. The first one is quite standard and concerns exchange by supergravity modes. We also consider a novel mechanism when the flux-tube formation is described by a barrier transition in the string language, dual to the field-theoretic formulation of Yang-Mills theories. The most interesting possibility within this approach is resonant tu…
I propose a way of unambiguously parallel transporting fields on non-Abelian flux tubes, or strings, by means of two gauge fields. One gauge field transports along the tube, while the other transports normal to the tube. Ambiguity is removed by imposing an integrability condition on the pair of fields. The construction leads to a gauge theory of mathematical objects known as Lie 2-groups, which are known to result also from the parallel transport of the flux tubes themselves. The integrability condition is also shown to be equivalent to the assumption that parallel transport along nearby strin…
A perfectly reflecting (Dirichlet) boundary condition at the edge of an impenetrable magnetic-flux-carrying tube of nonzero transverse size is imposed on the charged massive scalar matter field which is quantized outside the tube. We show that the vacuum polarization effects outside the tube give rise to a macroscopic force acting at the increase of the tube radius (if the magnetic flux is held steady). The Casimir energy and force are periodic in the value of the magnetic flux, being independent of the coupling to the space-time curvature scalar. We conclude that a topological defect of the v…
