Quark Confinement: Flux-Tube String Dynamics (2D)

This is a 2D companion to the 3D Cornell-potential flux-tube simulator, built on an independent, higher-fidelity model of the tube itself. Rather than a static rigid cylinder, the gluon flux tube is discretized into a chain of mass beads under real string tension and numerically integrated as a discrete transverse wave equation — the same physics that governs any string under tension, applied here to the confining color field. Pluck the string and watch a genuine wave travel down the tube and reflect off the quark and antiquark ends; the extra contour length that vibration adds feeds directly into the same Cornell-potential stored-energy budget that ultimately triggers string breaking, so a hard enough pluck near the threshold can hasten hadronization exactly as quantum fluctuations do for a real near-critical flux tube.