Instabilities of Coulomb phases and the Gribov picture of confinement

Abstract

A new picture of quark confinement based on the instability of Coulomb phase at low energy was introduced by Volodya Gribov in the early nineties. In QCD the effective [Formula: see text] coupling constant can reach very large values in the infrared regime what generates Coulomb phase instabilities. In the Gribov picture the instability leads to a vacuum decay into light quarks for coupling constants [Formula: see text] larger than a critical value [Formula: see text], for SU(N) gauge theories. The instability of Coulomb phase can be derived from first principles in any non-Abelian gauge theory for [Formula: see text], a value which is larger than the Gribov critical value. In this paper we review the analytic derivation of the Gribov mechanism from first principles and analyze the effects of dynamical quarks in the instability of the Coulomb phase. The instabilities associated to light quarks turn out to appear at larger values of [Formula: see text] than the ones induced from pure gluon dynamics, unlike it is expected in the standard Gribov scenario. The analytic results confirm the consistency of the picture where quark confinement is mainly driven by gluonic fluctuations.