Continuous smearing of Wilson Loops

Abstract

Continuum smearing was introduced in section 4.1 of JHEP03, 064 (2006) as a meaningful continuum analogue of the well known set of lattice techniques by the same name. Here we apply continuous smearing in continuous space-time to Wilson loops in order to clarify what it does in the context of field theory and also in the context of the loop calculus of the Makeenko-Migdal equation.