Vacuum polarization and the absence of free quarks

Abstract

This paper is addressed to the question of why isolated quark partons are not seen. It is argued that in vector gauge theories it is possible to have the short-distance and light-cone behavior of quark fields without real quark production in deep-inelastic reactions. The physical mechanism involved is the flow of vacuum-polarization currents which neutralize any outgoing quarks. Our ideas are inspired by arguments due to Schwinger and an intuitive picture of Bjorken. Two-dimensional (1 space, 1 time) vector gauge field theories provide exactly soluble examples of this phenomenon. The resulting picture of deep-inelastic final states predicts jets of hadrons and logarithmically rising multiplicities as conjectured by Bjorken and Feynman.