Effective string theory of flux tubes

Project funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P. (FCT) (FCT_CPCA_2023_01), grant 2023.11029.CPCA.A2. Funded amount: EUR 36,908, as stated by the source. Runs 2024-06-01 to 2025-05-31. Keywords: Monte Carlo, Conformal Field Theory, Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics, Effective String Theory, Exact sciences, Exact sciences/Physical sciences. Source: OpenAIRE Graph, from the funder's project data (collected by OpenAIRE on 2025-07-20); national funding data, not CORDIS; selected because its keywords name quantum. Abstract given by the source: Why do quarks confine into hadrons? This has remained an open question since the development of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). The main difficulty arises due to the absence of analytic tools to study this phenomenon. The perturbative framework, widely successful for Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), is insufficient for studying these strongly coupled emergent behaviors. Our current understanding of confinement stems mainly from integrable toy models, experiments, or lattice simulations. This began to change recently with effective string theory (EST) development in the static gauge. This effective theory describes the dynamics of flux tubes, phenomena speculated to cause confinement. Rather than attempting to derive the existence of flux tubes, this framework assumes their existence and studies their dynamics. This has led to significant breakthroughs in our understanding of flux tubes, like the discovery of low-energy universality, and the realization that the EST is remarkably predictive at low energies: the first three coefficients are fully fixed by symmetry. Some exploratory work exists that attempts to measure the first non-universal coefficients, achieving varying degrees of success. However, these results don’t have the level of precision required for scientific “discovery” or are incompatible with bootstrap results. Thus, more precise results, with a careful treatment of systematic errors, are required to be considered valid. This is what we propose to do. We aim to resolve this issue and provide reliable measurements of the first non-universal coefficient by addressing the problem innovatively, using an enhanced Wang-Landau multicanonical algorithm. The improvements we made to the Wang-Landau algorithm may have scientific interest on its own, in contexts that require high degrees of precision.

Original source.

Source: OpenAIRE Graph: projects of national funders, OpenAIRE, from the project data of Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P. (FCT). Retrieved 2026-10-28. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (OpenAIRE Graph). Selected metadata, adapted presentation; the publisher's record is authoritative. No endorsement by the source is implied. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).

AI-assisted summary: The project "Effective string theory of flux tubes" is funded by FCT with a grant of EUR 36,908, running from June 1, 2024, to May 31, 2025. It focuses on understanding quark confinement in hadrons using effective string theory and related methodologies. Suggested technology pillar: simulation. Generated by AI from the public source text; it may contain errors and the original source is authoritative.