STATIC HEAVY-QUARK POTENTIAL CALCULATED IN THE CLASSICAL APPROXIMATION TO DUAL QCD

We use the classical approximation to dual QCD to compute the distribution of color fields around heavy quarks and the static potential between them. The resulting potential is in excellent agreement with phenomenologically obtained ones. As the distance between the quark-antiquark pair increases, the color field lines evolve from a squashed dipole distribution to a flux-tube distribution. It is noteworthy that the potential becomes linear well before the appearance of a fully developed flux tube. A comparison of these field distributions with lattice Monte Carlo calculations could test quantitatively whether dual superconductivity is the physical mechanism for confinement in QCD.