QCD flux-tubes and fundamental strings
Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is our best description of strongly interacting particles called hadrons. Most familiar example of hadrons are protons and neutrons. According to QCD hadrons are not fundamental particles but are composed of quarks and gluons. Curiously, even though hadrons are made of quarks and gluons we cannot isolate a quark or a gluon, they always appear bounded together to form a hadron. This peculiar property is called the quark-confinement. It is reflected in the fact that, if we take a quark-antiquark pair and try to separate them then we find a flux-tube is formed whose energy increases as we separate the quark and the antiquark. Remarkably theories very similar to QCD, which show phenomenon of confinement, appears to be equivalent to a theory of strings but in one higher spatial dimension. This equivalence is referred to as Gauge/Gravity duality. My research is focused on developing qualitative and quantitative understanding of QCD using Gauge/Gravity duality.Publications
- Heavy Quark Potential from Gauge/Gravity Duality: A Large D Analysis (2013)
- Intrinsic Thickness of QCD Flux-Tubes (2010)
Joys of spin-half particles
The familiar matter is made of spin-half particles like electrons and quarks. Quantum mechanics together with the special theory of relativity provides a mathematically beautiful description of these particles via the Dirac equation. Alternatively, following Feynman, we can describe them using path-integrals. I have tried to understand some of the curious properties of spin-half particles in these papers
Publications
- Spin-String Interaction in QCD Strings (2008)
- Fermion doubling and the path-integral for a spin-half particle on a lattice (title is different on the ArXive) (1997)
