Variational estimate of the energy of an elementary excitation of the SU(2) lattice gauge theory

Abstract
We describe a variational estimate of the energy of an elementary excitation of the SU(2) lattice gauge theory. The vacuum state is modeled by a disordered trial wave function, which is optimized by the variational principle; and the excited state is constructed by letting a translation-invariant sum of plaquette operators act on the vacuum. The result does not have the proper continuum-limit behavior.