Project Coordinator from a NATO country: Jeff Greensite,
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, San Francisco State Univ., 1600 Holloway Ave., San Francisco, CA, USA
Project Coordinator from a Partner country: Stefan Olejník,
Institute of Physics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dúbravská cesta 9, SK-842 28 Bratislava, Slovakia
Other Principal Investigators: Manfried Faber,
Institut fuer Kernphysik, Technische Universitaet, A-1040 Vienna, Austria
Summary of the project:

Strong interactions are responsible for the stability of atomic nuclei. More than 25 years ago the theory of strong interactions, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), was formulated. It is now generally believed that this theory is able to explain and describe all properties of strongly interacting elementary particles.

In QCD, interactions of protons and neutrons, the building blocks of nuclei, are explained through interactions of their subconstituents, quarks and gluons, which have never been observed as free particles. The question of what is the underlying mechanism of the phenomenon of quark and gluon confinement remains a challenging problem of QCD. Our research group has devoted much effort in recent years to the study of various aspects of this question, using numerical simulations of quantum chromodynamics on a lattice. We have accumulated compelling evidence in favor of the model of confinement based on condensation of center vortices in the QCD vacuum.

The purpose of the present project is to continue the investigation of the center-vortex model of confinement and to study its consequences in considerable detail.

We will address these issues in further numerical simulations of lattice QCD, and also analytically in a simplified lower-dimensional model.

Recent publications of our group dealing with the topic of the project:
  1. R. Bertle, M. Faber, J. Greensite and S. Olejník.
    The structure of projected center vortices at zero and finite temperature.
    Nuclear Physics (Proc. Suppl.) 83-84 (2000) 425-427.
    (Archive: hep-lat/9909002.)
  2. R. Bertle, M. Faber, J. Greensite and S. Olejník.
    P-vortices, gauge copies, and lattice size.
    Journal of High Energy Physics 10 (2000) 007.
    (Archive: hep-lat/0007043.)
  3. R. Bertle, M. Faber, J. Greensite and S. Olejník.
    Center vortices in MCG - finite-size and gauge-copy effects.
    Nuclear Physics (Proc. Suppl.) 94 (2001) 482-485.
    (Archive: hep-lat/0010058.)
  4. R. Bertle, M. Faber, J. Greensite and S. Olejník.
    Center vortices and colour confinement in lattice QCD.
    In: Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum IV, ed. by Wolfgang Lucha and Khin Maung Maung (World Scientific, Singapore, 2002) 138-149.
    (Archive: hep-lat/0009017.)
  5. M. Faber, J. Greensite and S. Olejník.
    First evidence for center dominance in SU(3) lattice gauge theory.
    Physics Letters B474 (2000) 177-181.
    (Archive: hep-lat/9911006.)
  6. M. Faber, J. Greensite and S. Olejník.
    What are the confining field configurations of strong-coupling lattice gauge theory?
    Journal of High Energy Physics 06 (2000) 041.
    (Archive: hep-lat/0005017.)
  7. M. Faber, J. Greensite and S. Olejník.
    Center vortices at strong couplings.
    Nuclear Physics (Proc. Suppl.) 94 (2001) 510-513.
    (Archive: hep-lat/0010077.)
  8. M. Faber, J. Greensite and S. Olejník.
    Remarks on the Gribov problem in direct maximal center gauge.
    Physical Review D64 (2001) 034511.
    (Archive: hep-lat/0103030.)
  9. M. Faber, J. Greensite and S. Olejník.
    Direct Laplacian center gauge.
    Journal of High Energy Physics 11 (2001) 053.
    (Archive: hep-lat/0106017.)
  10. M. Faber, J. Greensite and S. Olejník.
    Center dominance recovered: Direct Laplacian center gauge.
    Nuclear Physics (Proc. Suppl.) 106-107 (2002) 652-654.
    (Archive: hep-lat/0109032.)
  11. M. Faber, J. Greensite and S. Olejník.
    Status of center dominance in various center gauges.
    In: Confinement, Topology, and Other Non-Perturbative Aspects of QCD, ed. by Jeff Greensite and Stefan Olejník (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2002) 117-127.
    (Archive: hep-lat/0204020.)
  12. M. Faber, J. Greensite, S. Olejník and D. Yamada.
    Some insights into the method of center projection.
    Nuclear Physics (Proc. Suppl.) 83-84 (2000) 527-529.
    (Archive: hep-lat/9908020.)
  13. M. Faber, J. Greensite, S. Olejník and D. Yamada.
    Some pieces of lattice evidence in favor of the center-vortex picture of color confinement.
    In: Lattice Fermions and Structure of the Vacuum,
    ed. by V. Mitrjushkin and G. Schierholz (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2000) 327-334.
    (Archive: hep-lat/9912002.)
  14. J. Greensite and S. Olejník.
    k-string tensions and center vortices at large N.
    Journal of High Energy Physics 09 (2002) 039.
    (Archive: hep-lat/0209088.)
  15. J. Greensite and S. Olejník.
    Center vortices at N>4 colors.
    Preprint (2002), to be published in Nuclear Physics (Proc. Suppl.).
    (Archive: hep-lat/0209138.)
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