Three-Quark Potential in SU(3) Lattice QCD

The static three-quark ( $3Q$) potential is studied in SU(3) lattice QCD with ${12}^3\times 24$ and $\beta =5.7\mathrm{}$ at the quenched level. From the $3Q$ Wilson loop, $3Q$ ground-state potential $V_{3Q}$ is extracted using the smearing technique for ground-state enhancement. With accuracy better than a few percent, $V_{3Q}$ is well described by a sum of a constant, the two-body Coulomb term, and the three-body linear confinement term ${\sigma }_{3Q}{L}_{\min }$, with $L_{\min }$ the minimal value of total length of color flux tubes linking the three quarks. Comparing with the $Q-\overline{Q}$ potential, we find a universal feature of the string tension, ${\sigma }_{3Q}\simeq {\sigma }_{Q\overline{Q}}$, and the OGE result for Coulomb coefficients, $A_{3Q}\simeq \frac{1}{2}{A}_{Q\overline{Q}}$.