Width of the Confining String in Yang-Mills Theory

We investigate the transverse fluctuations of the confining string connecting two static quarks in (2 + 1)D SU(2) Yang-Mills theory using Monte Carlo calculations. The exponentially suppressed signal is extracted from the large noise by a very efficient multilevel algorithm. The resulting width of the string increases logarithmically with the distance between the static quark charges. Corrections at intermediate distances due to universal higher-order terms in the effective string action are calculated analytically. They accurately fit the numerical data.