Unveiling confinement in pure gauge SU(3): flux tubes, fields, and magnetic currents

Understand

A characteristic signature of quark confinement is the concentration of the chromoelectric field between a static quark-antiquark pair in a flux tube.

• However, the structure of this flux tube, and hence of the confining force, has not been completely understood.
• Here we perform new lattice measurements of field distributions on smeared Monte Carlo ensembles in SU(3) gauge theory.
• On the basis of these simulations we demonstrate that the confining force can be understood using the analogy with the basic principles of electromagnetism as elucidated by Maxwell.