The Coulomb flux tube on the lattice

Abstract

In Coulomb gauge a longitudinal electric field is generated instantaneously with the creation of a static quark-antiquark pair. The field due to the quarks is a sum of two contributions, one from the quark and one from the antiquark, and there is no obvious reason that this sum should fall off exponentially with distance from the sources. We show here, however, from numerical simulations in pure SU(2) lattice gauge theory, that the color Coulomb electric field does in fact fall off exponentially with transverse distance away from a line joining static quark-antiquark sources, indicating the existence of a color Coulomb flux tube, and the absence of long-range Coulomb dipole fields.