Casimir scaling and Yang–Mills glueballs

We conjecture that in Yang–Mills theories the ratio between the ground-state glueball mass squared and the string tension is proportional to the ratio of the eigenvalues of quadratic Casimir operators in the adjoint and the fundamental representations. The proportionality constant depends on the dimension of the space-time only, and is henceforth universal. We argue that this universality, which is supported by available lattice results, is a direct consequence of area-law confinement. In order to explain this universal behavior, we provide three analytical arguments, based respectively on a Bethe–Salpeter analysis, on the saturation of the scale anomaly by the lightest scalar glueball and on QCD sum rules, commenting on the underlying assumptions that they entail and on their physical implications.