We report on recent results obtained within the Hamiltonian approach to QCD in Coulomb gauge. Furthermore this approach is compared to recent lattice data, which were obtained by an alternative gauge-fixing method and which show an improved agreement with the continuum results. By relating the Gribov confinement scenario to the center vortex picture of confinement, it is shown that the Coulomb string tension is tied to the spatial string tension. For the quark sector, a vacuum wave functional is used which explicitly contains the coupling of the quarks to the transverse gluons and which results in variational equations which are free of ultraviolet divergences. The variational approach is extended to finite temperatures by compactifying a spatial dimension. The effective potential of the Polyakov loop is evaluated from the zero-temperature variational solution. For pure Yang–Mills theory, the deconfinement phase transition is found to be second order for SU(2) and first order for SU(3), in agreement with the lattice results. The corresponding critical temperatures are found to be 275 MeV and 280 MeV, respectively. When quarks are included, the deconfinement transition turns into a crossover. From the dual and chiral quark condensate, one finds pseudocritical temperatures of 198 MeV and 170 MeV, respectively, for the deconfinement and chiral transition.
From Center-Vortex Ensembles to the Confining Flux Tube
