Coulomb Confinement from the Yang-Mills Vacuum State in 2+1 Dimensions

Abstract: The Coulomb-gauge ghost propagator, and the color-Coulomb potential, are computed in an ensemble of configurations derived from our recently proposed Yang-Mills vacuum wavefunctional in 2+1 dimensions. The results are compared to the corresponding values obtained by standard Monte Carlo simulations in three Euclidean dimensions. The agreement is quite striking for the Coulomb-gauge ghost propagator. The color-Coulomb potential rises linearly at large distances, but its determination suffers from rather large statistical fluctuations, due to configurations with very low values of $\mu_0$, the lowest eigenvalue of the Coulomb-gauge Faddeev-Popov operator. However, if one imposes cuts on the data, effectively leaving out configurations with very low $\mu_0$, the agreement of the potential in both sets of configurations is again satisfactory, although the errorbars grow systematically as the cutoff is eliminated.