Gauss's law, gauge invariance, and long-range forces in QCD

We use a unitary operator constructed in earlier work to transform the Hamiltonian for QCD in the temporal (A(0) = 0) gauge into a representation in which the quark field is gauge-invariant, and its elementary excitations - quark and antiquark creation and annihilation operators - implement Gauss's law. In that representation, the interactions between gauge-dependent parts of the gauge field and the spinor (quark) field have been transformed away and replaced by long-range non-local interactions of quark color charge densities. These long-range interactions connect SU(3) color charge densities through an infinite chain of gauge-invariant gauge fields either to other SU(3) color charge densities, or to a gluon ''anchor''. We discuss possible implications of this formalism for low-energy processes, including confinement of quarks that are not in color singlet configurations. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.