The confining string: Lattice results versus effective field theory

In analogy to the pions in chiral perturbation theory, the transverse fluctuations of a confining string in Yang-Mills theory are described by a systematic low-energy effective field theory. The predictions of the effective theory at the two-loop level are in quantitative agreement with high-precision Monte Carlo data obtained from lattice gauge theory. The decay and ultimate breaking of strings connecting charges in higher-dimensional representations of the gauge group are also investigated.