Interaction of Wilson loops in confining vacuum

Abstract

Nonperturbative and perturbative interaction mechanisms of Wilson loops in gluodynamics are studied within the background field formalism. The first one operates when distance between minimal surfaces of the loops is small and may be important for sea quark effects and strong decay processes. The second mechanism -- perturbative interaction in nonperturbative confining background is found to be physically dominant for all loop configurations characteristic of scattering process. It reduces to perturbative gluon exchanges at small distances, while at larger distances it corresponds to the t-channel exchange of (reggeized) glueball states. Comparison to other approaches is made and possible physical applications are discussed.