First evidence of Nf-dependence in the QCD interquark potential

Abstract We present a lattice calculation of the interquark potential between static quarks in a “full” QCD simulation with 2 flavours of dynamical Wilson-quarks at three intermediate sea-quark masses. We work at β = 5.6 on a lattice size of 163 × 32 with 100 configurations per sea-quark mass. We compare the full QCD potential with its quenched counterpart at equal lattice spacing, a −1 ⋍ 2.0 GeV , which is at the onset of the quenched scaling regime. We find that the full QCD potential lies consistently below that of quenched QCD. We see no evidence for string-breaking effects on these lattice volumes, V ⋍ (1.5 fm ) 3 .