Speaker
Description
We introduce a confinement framework based on Coulomb‑gauge QCD to study the bulk properties of dense matter. At finite temperature, we determine the in‑medium Coulomb potential via its relation to the quark number susceptibility and extract a nonperturbative screening mass from its pole structure. The resulting potential reproduces key qualitative features observed in lattice QCD.
In contrast to string‑flip–type models, where confinement is implemented through effective density expansions, confinement here enters as an explicit dynamical interaction, with chiral symmetry breaking treated consistently within the same framework. We compute the Polyakov loop and find that it tracks color screening rather than deconfinement, indicating that its standard interpretation in effective descriptions of QCD thermodynamics should be reconsidered.