3 The Landau-Ginzburg Model of a Dual Superconductor

Abstract

We shall describe color confinement in the QCD ground state in terms of a dual superconductor, which differs from usual metallic superconductors in that the roles of the electric and magnetic fields are exchanged. The dual superconductor will be described in terms of a suitably adapted Landau-Ginzburg model of superconductivity. The original model was developed in 1950 by Ginzburg and Landau [8]. Particle physicists refer to it today as the Dual Abelian Higgs model. The crucial property of the dual superconductor will be the Meissner effect [54], which expels the electric field (instead of the magnetic field, as in a usual superconductors). As a result, the color-electric field which is produced, for example, by a quark-antiquark pair embedded in the dual superconductor, acquires the shape of a color flux tube, thereby generating an asymptotically linear confining potential.