New ideas about confinement

This article reviews three recent ideas about the large scale behaviour of infrared unstable gauge theories. The results of Coleman, Jackiw and Susskind concerning charge shielding in the massive Schwinger model are reviewed. This shielding plays an important role in screening the long range quark confining forces and in decoupling the massive vector gluons from the physical sector. The salient features of 3-dimensional confinement learned from lattice gauge theory are described. The importance of quantum fluctuations of the infrared degrees of freedom and the quantization of electric flux in non-abelian theories is specially emphasized. A method for solving infrared unstable gauge theories by applying a strong coupling expansion to the lattice version of the theory is described and it is shown how the method can be used to find numerically accurate solutions for the Schwinger model with or without fermion mass terms. (Auth.)