Cornell potential

In particle physics, the Cornell potential is an effective method to account for the confinement of quarks in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). It was developed by Estia J. Eichten, Kurt Gottfried, Toichiro Kinoshita, John Kogut, Kenneth Lane and Tung-Mow Yan at Cornell University^[1][2] in the 1970s to explain the masses of quarkonium states and account for the relation between the mass and angular momentum of the hadron (the so-called Regge trajectories). The potential has the form:^[3]

${\displaystyle V(r)=-{\frac {4}{3}}{\frac {\alpha _{s}}{\;r\;}}+\sigma \,r+{\text{constant}}}$

where ${\displaystyle r}$ is the effective radius of the quarkonium state, ${\displaystyle \alpha _{s}}$ is the QCD running coupling, ${\displaystyle \sigma }$ is the QCD string tension and ${\displaystyle {\text{constant}}\simeq -0.3}$ GeV is a constant. Initially, ${\displaystyle \alpha _{s}}$ and ${\displaystyle \sigma }$ were merely empirical parameters but with the development of QCD can now be calculated using perturbative QCD and lattice QCD, respectively.