Short-range potentials from QCD at order $g^2$

Abstract

We systematically compute the effective short-range potentials arising from second order QCD-diagrams related to bound states of quarks, antiquarks, and gluons. Our formalism relies on the assumption that the exchanged gluons are massless, while the constituent gluons as well as the lightest quarks acquire a nonvanishing constituent mass because of confinement. The potentials we obtain include the first relativistic corrections, thus spin-spin terms, spin-orbit terms, etc. Such effective potentials are expected to be relevant for the building of accurate potential models describing usual hadrons as well as exotic ones like glueballs and $q\bar q g$ hybrids. In particular, we compute for the first time an effective quark-gluon potential, and show the existence of a quadrupolar interaction term in this case. We also discuss the influence of a possible nonzero mass for the exchanged gluons.