Di-Quarks and Tri-Quarks on the Lattice

The distribution of gluon fields in hadrons is of fundamental interest in QCD. Using lattice QCD we have observed the formation of gluon flux tubes within tri-quark (baryon) systems for a wide variety of spatial distributions of the color sources. In particular we have investigated configurations where two of the quarks are close together and the third quark is some distance away, which approximates a quark plus diquark string. We find that the string tension of the quark-diquark string is the same as that of the quark-antiquark string on the same lattice. We also compare the longitudinal and transverse profiles of the gluon flux tubes for both sets of strings, and find them to be of similar radii and to have similar vacuum suppression.