Comparison of gluon flux-tube distributions for quark-diquark and quark-antiquark hadrons

Abstract

The distribution of gluon fields in hadrons is of fundamental interest in QCD. Using lattice QCD we have observed the formation of gluon flux tubes within three-quark (baryon) and quark plus antiquark (meson) systems for a wide variety of spatial distributions of the color sources. In particular we have investigated three-quark configurations where two of the quarks are close together and the third quark is some distance away, which approximates a quark plus diquark string. We find that the string tension of the quark-diquark string is the same as that of the quark-antiquark string on the same lattice. We also compare the longitudinal and transverse profiles of the gluon flux tubes for both sets of strings, and find them to be of similar radii and to have similar vacuum suppression. © 2009 The American Physical Society.