Fluctuations of the baryonic flux-tube junction from effective string theory

Abstract

In quenched QCD, where the dynamic creation of quark-antiquark pairs out of the vacuum is neglected, a confined baryonic system composed of three static quarks exhibits stringlike behavior at large interquark separation, with the formation of flux tubes characterized by the geometry of the so-called $Y$ ansatz. We study the fluctuations of the junction of the three flux tubes, assuming the dynamics to be governed by an effective bosonic string model. We show that the asymptotic behavior of the effective width of the junction grows logarithmically with the distance between the sources, with the coefficient depending on the number of joining strings, on the dimension of spacetime and on the string tension.