U.S.-Germany Cooperative Research: Quark Confinement and Hadronic Processes

Kent State University, Kent OH

Investigators

Abstract

0129236 Tandy This award supports Peter Tandy and students from Kent State University in a collaboration with Reinhard Alkofer of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Tuebingen, Germany. The project focuses on hadronic processes in terms of confined quarks and gluons by bringing together two presently disparate lines of investigation. The US side has expertise in continuum nonperturbative QCD modeling of hadrons using the Dyson-Schwinger equations. To be useful, the results must be packaged in the form of model solutions of the gauge sector Dyson-Schwinger equations for at least the gluon and ghost-dressed propagators and the gluon-quark vertex. This is exactly the expertise of the German group. They have recently produced the most advanced solutions of truncat4ed forms of the gauge sector Dyson-Schwinger equations and have found unexpected behavior that relates to the origin of quark confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking. The project has the potential to impact the search for quark-gluon plasma, nuclear astrophysics, early universe cosmology, and strongly interacting field theory. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international