An axion-like mechanism for confinement in QCD

Abstract

This letter is about confinement in QCD. At the moment we have pictures of confinement to complete our understanding of the physics of strongly interacting particles, interaction which asks for confinement. As it is said in [1] : " In principle it should be possible to derive the confinement hypothesis from the QCD Lagrangian. At this time, no rigorous derivation exists, so it is not absolutely clear that the confinement hypothesis is a bone fide prediction of QCD". In this letter we show that a sufficient (of course not necessary) condition for confinement is that topological structure of vacuum in Nature does not correspond to the $\theta$-vacuum. Therefore, if different vacua with nontrivial winding number cannot be connected by tunneling, we obtain confinement as a consequence. Moreover, we show that an axion-like mechanism would suffice to describe a confined QCD phase.