Precise determination of the three-quark potential in SU(3) lattice gauge theory

Abstract

We investigate the static interquark potential for the three-quark system in SU(3) lattice gauge theory at zero temperature by using Monte Carlo simulations. We extract the potential from the correlation function of the three Polyakov loops, which are computed by employing the multilevel algorithm. We obtain remarkably clean results of the three-quark potential for O(200) sets of the three-quark configurations of various sizes and geometries including not only the cases that three quarks are put at the vertices of acute, right, and obtuse triangles, but also the extreme cases such that three quarks are put in line. We find several new interesting features of the three-quark potential and then discuss its possible functional form.