The QCD vacuum, confinement and strings in the Vacuum Correlator Method

In this review paper the QCD vacuum properties and the structure of color fields in hadrons are studied using the complete set of gauge-invariant correlators of gluon fields. Confinement in QCD is produced by the correlators of some certain Lorentz structure, which violate abelian Bianchi identities and therefore are absent in the case of QED. These correlators are used to define an effective colorless field, which satisfies Maxwell equation with nonzero effective magnetic current. With the help of the effective field and correlators it is shown that quarks are confined due to effective magnetic currents, squeezing gluonic fields into a string, in agreement with the ``dual Meissner effect''. Distribution of effective gluonic fields are plotted in mesons, baryons and glueballs with static sources.