The vacuum wavefunctional

Abstract

The static quark potential arises from vacuum fluctuations of the gauge fields; this is clear from the fact that the potential is extracted from the vacuum expectation value of a Wilson loop. In a Euclidean functional integral, the orientation of a rectangular R × T loop is obviously irrelevant to the expectation value, and in particular it can be oriented in a plane at a fixed time. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.