AN EFFECTIVE THEORY FOR THE QCD VACUUM

We provide an alternative description of the salient non-perturbative features of the QCD vacuum. We show that gauge invariance requires the Yang-Mills action to have non-polynomial terms which explicitly depend on the ultraviolet cutoff. We conjecture that these terms are crucial for understanding the non-perturbative aspects of the vacuum. We suggest a simple sine-Gordon effective theory to incorporate these non-polynomial terms in the infrared. We then derive confinement of color charges, linear heavy-quark potentials and dynamical breakdown of chiral symmetry in our effective model.