If you have, say, a proton it has gluon field fluctuations around it. Those flux tubes between the quarks suppresses the gluon field fluctuations and create a true vacuum between them(correct me if I'm wrong), but how does that bind the quarks together?
I've read that it costs energy to clear the vacuum out, but I still don't quite get it.
Thank you!
The existense of the quarks suppresses the gluon fluctuations creating the flux-tubes. But yeah, it requires energy to separate the quarks with the flux tubes, that's why when they are sufficiently separated the energy is used to create the quark-anti quark pair called meson. And you probably mentioned The "true" vacuum because of the suppression of the flux tubes in the gluon field that causes it to be absolutely nothing in there (TRUE empty space).
The flux tube contains a certain energy per unit distance. Therefore, pulling quarks further apart costs energy; pulling them infinitely far apart costs infinitely much energy (because the flux tube must then be infinitely long).
BTW, you talk about the "true" vacuum in your question. Do you mean the true physical vacuum or the original, naive, perturbative one? It's the second one that exist (kind of) within the proton, but I don't know if you can call that one "true".
