https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-023-00966-0
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Tachyon condensation in a chromomagnetic background field and the groundstate of QCD
Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Leipzig, 04081, Leipzig, Germany
Received:
14
November
2022
Accepted:
28
February
2023
Published online:
21
March
2023
I consider the chromomagnetic vacuum in SU(2). The effective Lagrangian in one loop approximation is known to have a minimum below zero which results in a spontaneously generated magnetic field. However, this minimum is not stable; the effective action has an imaginary part. Over the past decades, there were many attempts to handle this situation which all were at some point unsatisfactory. I propose an idea for a new solution by assuming that the tachyonic mode, at low temperature, acquires a condensate and, as a result, undergoes a phase transition like in the Higgs model. I consider the approximation where all gluon modes are dropped except for the tachyonic one. For this mode, we have a O(2)-model with quartic self-interaction in two dimensions. I apply the CJT (2PI) formalism in Hartree approximation. As a result, at zero and low temperatures, a minimum of the effective action at a certain value of the condensate and of the background fields is observed and there is no imaginary part. Raising the temperature, this minimum becomes shallower and at a critical temperature, the perturbative state becomes that with lower effective potential; the symmetry is restored. The physical interpretation says that the unstable mode creates tachyons until these come into equilibrium with their repulsive self-interaction and form a condensate. The relation to the Mermin-Wagner theorem is discussed.
© The Author(s) 2023
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
