Static model of the quark potential

We present a semiclassical method for calculating the potential energy of a heavy quark-antiquark pair. Our method preserves the operator charge structure of the quark and antiquark. The operator structure of the gluon fields is approximately maintained by truncating the gluon degrees of freedom to a minimal set, a set which preserves the operator charge structure of the quark-antiquark-gluon system. The energy of this truncated system is determined using a variational principle. The potential thus determined accurately reproduces the results of renormalization-group improved perturbation theory up to and including effects of at least order ${\alpha }^4\ln \alpha$.