Hadronic String from Confinement

Abstract

The existence of hadronic string is derived as a consequence of confinement in QCD. A state of ``stretched glue'', created by a Polyakov loop operator, is shown to have translational zero-modes which are stringy degrees of freedom. These modes are described by an effective string theory, valid for world- sheets which are locally flat on length scales of order $\Lambda_{QCD}^{-1}$, the dominant behavior being given by the Nambu-Goto action. In a subsequent paper, these effective strings will be shown to emerge in mesons stretched by their orbital angular momentum, thereby deriving some aspects of Regge phenomenology directly from QCD and confinement.