The Gribov Theory of Quark Confinement

Book excerpt: V N Gribov, one of the founders of modern particle physics, shaped our understanding of QCD as the microscopic dynamics of hadrons. This volume collects his papers on quark confinement, showing the road he followed to arrive at the theory and formulating the theory itself. It begins with papers providing a beautiful physical explanation of asymptotic freedom based on the phenomenon of antiscreening and demonstrating the inconsistency of the standard perturbative treatment of the gluon fields (Gribov copies, Gribov horizon). It continues with papers presenting the Gribov theory according to which confinement of colour is determined by the existence of practically massless quarks. The last two papers conclude Gribov''s twenty-year-long study of the problem; QCD is formulated as a quantum field theory containing both perturbative and nonperturbative phenomena, and the confinement is based on the supercritical binding of light quarks. Contents: Quantization of Non-Abelian Gauge Theories (V N Gribov); Instability of Non-Abelian Gauge Theories and Impossibility of Choice of Coulomb Gauge (V N Gribov); Local Confinement of Charge in Massless QED (V N Gribov); Outlook (V N Gribov); Possible Solution of the Problem of Quark Confinement (V N Gribov); Orsay Lectures on Confinement (I) (V N Gribov); Orsay Lectures on Confinement (II) (V N Gribov); Orsay Lectures on Confinement (III) (V N Gribov); The Theory of Quark Confinement (V N Gribov); QCD at Large and Short Distances (V N Gribov); and other papers. Readership: Graduate students, and researchers in quantum field theory and particle physics.