Paper detail

Effective potential between two transverse gluons from lattice QCD

Modeling glueballs as bound states of transverse constituent gluons allows to understand the main features of the lattice QCD glueball spectrum. In particular it has been shown in previous works that the lightest C-even glueballs can be seen as bound states of two transverse constituent gluons interacting via a funnel potential. In the present study we show that such an effective potential emerges from the available lattice QCD data. Starting from the scalar glueball mass and wave function computed in lattice QCD, we indeed compute the equivalent local potential between two transverse constituent gluons in the scalar channel and show that it is compatible with a funnel shape, where standard values of the parameters are used and where a negative constant has to be added to reproduce the absolute height of the potential. Such a constant could be related to instanton-induced effects in glueballs.