Boson-mediated interactions between static sources

The techniques are now available for doing accurate computations of static potentials arising from the exchange of virtual mesons. Such computations must take account of the fact that different approximation methods must be used in the regions where R is large and where R is small. In the asymptotic region, the distorted-field approximation provides an appropriate starting-point, but it must be improved before trustworthy results are obtained for all but the largest values of R. In the region of small R, accurate strong-coupling methods are based on the use of states with coherent meson pairs. For small R, it is also important to take account of the possibility of meson emission or near-emission. Current work is aimed at applying the techniques described to the case of static sources interacting via pion field. In particular, it will be interesting to see how sensitive the potential is to the value of the cutoff Λ. Other areas of application are the study of the effects of nonlinearity and models of quark-quark and quark-antiquark potentials. 17 references