Yang-Mills Ground State in 2+1 Dimensions and Temporal Gauge

Abstract

A gauge-invariant wavefunctional is proposed as an approximation to the ground state of Yang-Mills theory in 2+1 dimensions, quantized in temporal gauge. The proposed vacuum state is the true ground state of the appropriate Hamiltonian in both the free-field limit, and in a zero mode strong-field limit. Confinement, in this approach, arises via dimensional reduction, and we present numerical results for the mass gap. The issue of color screening is briefly discussed.