Sunday, October 14, 2018

The mass gap and confinement in QCD

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang–Mills_existence_and_mass_gap

The existence of a lowest energy excitation state of the gluon field in quantum chromodynamics forms a part of a Clay Millennium problem. We should be able to show that glueballs have a lowest possible mass. According to Wikipedia, computer simulations support this hypothesis, and there are heuristic arguments, too.

The photon field does not have a lowest energy for excitation: a photon is allowed to have an infinitesimal energy.

If glueballs of a very low energy would exist, then the strong force would be able to escape its "confinement" in hadrons and affect low-energy phenomena.

In this blog we have been developing the elastic rod model of a virtual photon. Let us look if we can say something about the confinement of the strong force.

Classically, the mass gap problem is the following: suppose that you have a complex gadget with drum skins, springs, rubber bands, weights, whatever. Show that it does not have low resonance frequencies. If you hit the gadget, it will let off only high-pitch sounds. Its possible low-frequency "sounds" contain no complete cycles. Rather, they are pressure impulses.

The gadget in question is the chromodynamic force field. We should study what kind of a "drum skin" it is.

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