A Mechanism for Quark Confinement

Abstract

I shall describe in this lecture a new approach to the dynamics of quarks. It is widely believed that the strong interactions are described by QCD, a nonabelian (SU(3)) gauge theory of colored quarks and gluons, permanently confined in color singlet hadronic bound states. Our knowledge of the nature of the constituents of hadrons derives from their observed symmetries, the success of various phenomenological models such as the quark model and most important from the observed short distance behavior of hadronic currents. It is this free-field theory behavior at large momentum (asymptotic freedom) that singles out nonabelian gauge interactions as the source of the strong interactions, allows us to directly observe the quantum numbers of the quarks and to derive quantative predictions that can test the validity of the theory.