Theory of Confinement

Abstract

The long series of successes of the quark model make other possibilities quite hard to consider. At the same time, searches for fractional charges have been made, but none has ever been detected. This has led to the conclusion that isolated quarks cannot be observed for some reason, an idea known as the quark confinement hypothesis. This hypothesis has in fact been generalized to the idea that no coloured particle can ever be observed. This is the colour confinement hypothesis.

In order to discuss confinement for general coloured particles, the author has considered a mechanism for confinement based on an analogy with QED. If we apply this kind of mechanism to confinement for particles with colours, it turns out to be inevitable to introduce indefinite metrics and additional conditions. For non-Abelian gauge fields, all the tools are to hand. It thus turns out that colour confinement holds true if all particle states with colours belong to BRS doublets. We thus investigate under what kind of conditions such a thing could be realized.