This writeup is a compilation of the predictions for the forthcoming Heavy Ion Program at the Large Hadron Collider, as presented at the CERN Theory Institute ‘Heavy Ion Collisions at the LHC—Last Call for Predictions’, held from 14th May to 10th June 2007.

Using the cumulant expansion for an averaged Wilson loop we derive an action of the gluodynamics string in the form of a series in powers of the correlation length of the vacuum. In the lowest orders it contains the Nambu–Goto term and the rigidity term with the corresponding coupling constants computed from the bilocal correlator of gluonic fields. Some higher derivative corrections are also calculated.

Recent progress achieved in the solution of the problem of confinement in various (non-)Abelian gauge theories by virtue of a derivation of their string representation is reviewed. The theories under study include QCD within the so-called Method of Field Correlators, QCD-inspired Abelian-projected theories, and compact QED in three and four space-time dimensions. Various nonperturbative properties of the vacua of the above mentioned theories are discussed. The relevance of the Method of Field Correlators to the study of confinement in Abelian models, allowing for an analytical description of this phenomenon, is illustrated by an evaluation of field correlators in these models. * Based on the Ph.D. thesises at the Humboldt University of Berlin (1999) (available under http://dochost.rz.hu-berlin.de) and the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, Moscow (2000). †

A topological term related to the number of self-intersections of the string world-sheet is shown to emerge in the string representation of the Wilson loop in the dilute instanton gas. The coupling constant of this term occurs to be proportional to the topological charge of the instanton gas under consideration.

The quark condensate is calculated in terms of the effective string tension and the constituent quark mass. For 3 colors and 2 light flavors, the constituent mass is bounded from below by the value of 460 MeV. This value is only accessible when the string tension decreases linearly with the Schwinger proper time. For this reason, the Hausdorff dimension of a light-quark trajectory is equal to 4, indicating that these trajectories are similar to branched polymers, which can describe a weak first-order deconfinement phase transition in SU(3) Yang-Mills theory. Using this indication, we develop a gluon-chain model based on such trajectories.Comment: 27 pages, 5 figure

Confining strings and RG flow at finite temperature are investigated in the (2+1)-dimensional Georgi-Glashow model. This is done in the limit when the electric coupling constant is much larger than the square root of mass of the Higgs field, but much smaller than the vacuum expectation value of this field. The modification of the Debye mass of the dual photon with respect to the case when it is considered to be negligibly small compared to the Higgs mass, is found. Analogous modifications of the potential of monopole densities and string coupling constants are found. At finite temperature, the mass of the Higgs field scales according to a novel RG equation. It is checked that in the limit when the original theory is reduced by the RG flow to the 2D XY model, the so-evolved Higgs mass is still much smaller than the squared electric coupling constant. The SU(3)-theory of confining strings is also discussed within the same approximations.

By making use of the path integral duality transformation, we derive the string representation for the partition function of an extended Dual Abelian Higgs Model containing gauge fields of external currents of electrically charged particles. By the same method, we obtain the corresponding representations for the generating functionals of gauge field and monopole current correlators. In the case of bilocal correlators, the obtained results are found to be in agreement with the dual Meissner scenario of confinement and with the Stochastic Model of the QCD

The quark condensate is calculated within the world-line effective-action formalism, by using for the Wilson loop an ansatz provided by the stochastic vacuum model.Starting with the relation between the quark and the gluon condensates in the heavyquark limit, we diminish the current quark mass down to the value of the inverse vacuum correlation length, finding in this way a 64%-decrease in the absolute value of the quark condensate. In particular, we find that the conventional formula for the heavy-quark condensate cannot be applied to the c-quark, and that the corrections to this formula can reach 23% even in the case of the b-quark. We also demonstrate that, for an exponential parametrization of the two-point correlation function of gluonic field strengths, the quark condensate does not depend on the non-confining non-perturbative interactions of the stochastic background Yang-Mills fields.