On the Dirac Structure of Confinement

Abstract

The Dirac structure of confinement is shown to be of timelike-vector nature in the heavy quark limit of QCD. This stands in contradiction with the phenomenological success of the Dirac scalar confining potential. A resolution is achieved through the demonstration that an effective scalar interaction is dynamically generated by nonperturbative mixing between ordinary and hybrid $Q \bar Q$ states. The resolution depends crucially on the collective nature of the gluonic degrees of freedom. This implies that dynamical gluonic effects are vital when attempting to incorporate fine structure in models of the $Q \bar Q$ interaction.