On the quark-antiquark potential at short distances Original Research Article

We investigate the static quark-antiquark potential up to distances of 8 lattice units for pure SU(2) gauge theory on lattices with anisotropic couplings. The action is the Wilson action with a coupling for time-like plaquettes which differs from those for space-like ones. Numerical simulations are performed in a large range of β The potential is obtained by fitting “cooled” Wilson loops with up to four exponential terms. An interpolation of the potentials by a sum of a perturbative term, a linear term and by lattice artifacts shows poor scaling in comparison with he isotropic case. If the coupling in the time-like region is reduced, the linear term is much smaller than in the isotropic case, and vice versa. Consequences for the bag picture for hadrons are discussed.