Measurements of the Yang-Mills vacuum wavefunctional, and related studies

Abstract

I present numerical tests of several recent proposals for the Yang-Mills vacuum wavefunctional in D=2+1 dimensions. In these tests the predicted relative values of the squared wavefunctional, evaluated on a finite set of abelian plane wave and non-abelian constant configurations, are compared to the corresponding values for the true ground state, extracted from Monte Carlo simulations. I also study how the 2+1 dimensional color Coulomb potential, averaged over a set of simple trial configurations, varies with the proximity of those configurations to the Gribov horizon.