Heavy-Quarkonium Potential from Lattice Gluon Propagator

The study of heavy quarks is of great interest for the search of physics beyond the Standard Model and the understanding of nonperturbative aspects of QCD. One of the early attempts to study these systems was the potential model approach. The Cornell potential is perhaps the most successful of these potentials. However, the use of perturbation theory in its building process implies that it is unable to model confinement without the ad-hoc addition of a linear term. In this paper, we modify the Cornell potential by using a (nonperturbative) lattice gluon propagator. This approach allowed us to verify that the use of perturbation theory washes away confinement. We were able to use this modified potential in the Schrodinger equation to obtain numerically the spectrum of heavy quarkonia (charmonium and bottomonium). We use the Cornell-potential spectrum as a benchmark of our potential. The result shows that our potential was able to describe better the spin-average of the experimental states than the Cornell potential. We also computed interquark distances for the quarkonia states.