A dynamical mechanism for quark confinement

Abstract

Recently there has been progress in the understanding of the confinement mechanism in Landau gauge QCD. The emerging dynamical description in terms of the underlying gauge dependent degrees of freedom goes beyond the static confinement in the quenched limit and has the potential to describe the scale-dependent phenomenon seen in nature, where new hadrons are produced when the system is sufficiently excited. I point out that the confinement mechanism for quarks is rather different from the corresponding one for gluons and that both are embedded in a consistent framework that can describe important qualitative properties of strong interaction physics, like chiral symmetry breaking, spontaneous and anomalous mass generation and a linear rising heavy quark potential with an almost quark-mass independent string tension.