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Wilson/Polyakov loops in Weinberg's QFT books

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I wanted to know if the discussion on Wilson loops and Polyakov loops (and their relationship to confinement and asymptotic freedom) is present in the 3 volumes of Weinberg's QFT books but in some other name or heading.

At least I couldn't naively find these topics in that book.

I was hoping to see some detailed discussion about these non-local physical observables and also may be some model calculations and evaluations of them in some gauge theories. In Eduardo Fradkin's lecture notes there exists an evaluation of the Wilson loop in free Maxwell's theory and that too in a certain limit of large time and large separation and thats the only example of such a calculation that I have seen.

{Aside: I would be grateful if people can also point to other pedagogic/classic/path-breaking papers/references in this topic of Wilson loops. To start off these are four papers that I came across while searching along this direction - arXiv:hep-th/0003055, arXiv:hep-th/9911088, arXiv:hep-ph/0905.2317, arXiv:hep-th/9803002}

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asked Dec 27, 2011 in Theoretical Physics by Anirbit (585 points) [ no revision ]
retagged Apr 19, 2014 by dimension10

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2 Answers

The original papers by Geraldus 't Hooft himself are quite readable.

Whenever I open these papers, I'm always awestruck.

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answered Dec 28, 2011 by Yuji (1,395 points) [ no revision ]

Thanks a lot for the references! You have any insights about whether Weinberg has somehow garbed this topic of Wilson/Polyakov loops in some other form/terminology? It would be weird if this classic topic in gauge theory doesn't feature in the classic book on QFT!

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commented Dec 28, 2011 by Anirbit (585 points) [ no revision ]

I don't know if it's in it or not (look for "area law" or "confinement" in it). Note that you and I may think this topic as classic, but I guess it can be too modern a topic for him. Anyway, just stop regarding his book as sacred.

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commented Dec 28, 2011 by Yuji (1,395 points) [ no revision ]

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The lecture 7 and 10 by Witten in the following book contain a good review on this issue.

Quantum fields and strings: a course for mathematicians, Volume 2

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answered Jan 1, 2012 by Satoshi Nawata (345 points) [ no revision ]

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