Quantifying zigzag motion of quarks

Abstract

The quark condensate is calculated in terms of the effective string tension and the constituent quark mass. For 3 colors and 2 light flavors, the constituent mass is bounded from below by the value of 460 MeV. This value is only accessible when the string tension decreases linearly with the Schwinger proper time. For this reason, the Hausdorff dimension of a light-quark trajectory is equal to 4, indicating that these trajectories are similar to branched polymers, which can describe a weak first-order deconfinement phase transition in SU(3) Yang-Mills theory. Using this indication, we develop a gluon-chain model based on such trajectories.