  String breaking by dynamical quarks in (2+1)-d lattice QCD is demonstrated in
this project, by measuring the static potential and the local color-electric
field strength between a heavy quark and antiquark pair at large separations.
Simulations are done for unquenched SU(2) color with two flavors of staggered
quarks. An improved gluon action is used which allows simulations to be done on
coarse lattices, providing an extremely efficient means to access the quark
separations and propagation times at which string breaking occurs. The static
quark potential is extracted using only Wilson loop operators and hence no
valence quarks are present in the trial states. Results give unambiguous
evidence for string breaking as the static quark potential completely saturates
at twice the heavy-light meson mass at large separations. It is also shown that
the local color-electric field strength between the quark pair tends toward
vacuum values at large separations. Implications of these results for
unquenched simulations of QCD in 4-d are drawn.
