Lattice Gluon Propagator and One-Gluon-Exchange Potential

We consider the interquark potential in the one-gluon-exchange approximation, using a fully nonperturbative gluon propagator from large-volume lattice simulations. In so doing, we hope to get a better insight about confinement as an emergent property of the interquark interaction, induced by the gluon propagator, rather than as a built-in feature. The resulting potential, however, is nonconfining, although it allows the characterization of a few low-lying bound states of charmonium and bottomonium. We thus conclude, contrary to a previous study, that this approximation is not sufficient to describe the infrared sector of QCD. For completeness, we obtain a better description of these spectra by adding to the potential a linearly growing term. The obtained results are then comparable with the corresponding ones from using the Cornell potential. As a byproduct of our study, we estimate the interquark distance in charmonium and bottomonium states.