The Unreasonable effectiveness of effective string theory: The case of the 3D SU(2) Higgs model

Claudio Bonati,Michele Caselle,Silvia Morlacchi

doi:10.1103/physrevd.104.054501

Abstract

We study string breaking in the three dimensional SU(2) Higgs model, using values of the gauge coupling for which the confinement-like and Higgs-like regions of the phase diagram are separated just by a smooth crossover. We show that even in the presence of string breaking, the confining part of the interquark potential is well described by the Effective String Theory and that also the fine details of the effective string, like the higher order terms of the Nambu-Goto action or the boundary correction, can be precisely extracted from the fits and agree with the effective string predictions. We comment on the implications of these results for QCD simulations with dynamical quarks.

Highlights

We show that even in the presence of string breaking, the confining part of the interquark potential is well described by the effective string theory and that the fine details of the effective string, like the higher order terms of the Nambu-Goto action or the boundary correction, can be precisely extracted from the fits and agree with the effective string predictions
A powerful tool to describe the nonperturbative behaviour of the interquark potential in confining gauge theories is the so-called effective string theory (EST) in which the confining flux tube joining together a static quark-antiquark pair is modeled as a thin vibrating string [1,2,3,4,5]
As a preliminary step test we first studied the static potential in the βh 1⁄4 0 case in which no string breaking is present and compared our results with those of [25] whose simulations were performed at the same β 1⁄4 9 value

Summary

Introduction

A powerful tool to describe the nonperturbative behaviour of the interquark potential in confining gauge theories is the so-called effective string theory (EST) in which the confining flux tube joining together a static quark-antiquark pair is modeled as a thin vibrating string [1,2,3,4,5] This approach has a long history (for a review see for instance [6,7,8]) and has been shown to be a highly predictive effective model, whose results can be successfully compared with the most precise existing Monte Carlo simulations in lattice gauge theories (LGTs).

Objectives

Results

Conclusion