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Hamiltonian Approach to QCD: The effective potential of the Polyakov loop

The effective potential of the order parameter for confinement is calculated within the Hamiltonian approach to Yang--Mills theory. Compactifying one spatial dimension and using a background gauge fixing this potential is obtained by minimizing the energy density for a given background field. Using Gaussian type trial wave functionals I establish an analytic relation between the propagators in the background gauge at finite temperature and the corresponding zero temperature propagators in Coulomb gauge. In the simplest truncation, neglecting the ghost and using the ultraviolet form of the gluon energy one recovers the Weiss potential. From the fully non-perturbative potential (with the ghost included) one extracts a critical temperature of the deconfinement phase transition of 270 MeV for the gauge group SU(2).