BRST-driven cancellations and gauge invariant Green's functions

We study a fundamental, all order cancellation operating between graphs of distinct kinematic nature, which allows for the construction of gauge-independent effective self-energies, vertices, and boxes at arbitrary order.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. Contributed to QCD 03: High-Energy Physics International Conference in Quantum Chromodynamics, Montpellier, France, 2-9 July 200

On the definition and observability of the neutrino charge radius

We present a brief summary of recent results concerning the unambiguous definition and experimental extraction of the gauge-invariant and process-independent neutrino charge radius.Comment: 5 pages, no figures, talk presented at the XXX International Meeting on Fundamental Physics, IMFP2002, Jaca (Huesca), January 28th -- February 1st, 200

The heavy quark decomposition of the S-matrix and its relation to the pinch technique

We propose a decomposition of the S-matrix into individually gauge invariant sub-amplitudes, which are kinematically akin to propagators, vertices, boxes, etc. This decompsition is obtained by considering limits of the S-matrix when some or all of the external particles have masses larger than any other physical scale. We show at the one-loop level that the effective gluon self-energy so defined is physically equivalent to the corresponding gauge independent self-energy obtained in the framework of the pinch technique. The generalization of this procedure to arbitrary gluonic $n$-point functions is briefly discussed.Comment: 11 uuencoded pages, NYU-TH-94/10/0

On the connection between the pinch technique and the background field method

The connection between the pinch technique and the background field method is further explored. We show by explicit calculations that the application of the pinch technique in the framework of the background field method gives rise to exactly the same results as in the linear renormalizable gauges. The general method for extending the pinch technique to the case of Green's functions with off-shell fermions as incoming particles is presented. As an example, the one-loop gauge independent quark self-energy is constructed. We briefly discuss the possibility that the gluonic Green's functions, obtained by either method, correspond to physical quantities.Comment: 13 pages and 3 figures, all included in a uuencoded file, to appear in Physical Review

The neutrino charge radius in the presence of fermion masses

We show how the crucial gauge cancellations leading to a physical definition of the neutrino charge radius persist in the presence of non-vanishing fermion masses. An explicit one-loop calculation demonstrates that, as happens in the massless case, the pinch technique rearrangement of the Feynman amplitudes, together with the judicious exploitation of a fundamental current relation leads to a completely gauge independent definition of the effective neutrino charge radius. Using the formalism of the Nielsen identities it is further proved that the same cancellation mechanism operates unaltered to all orders in perturbation theory.Comment: 26 pages, 8 figure

Chiral symmetry breaking with lattice propagators

We study chiral symmetry breaking using the standard gap equation, supplemented with the infrared-finite gluon propagator and ghost dressing function obtained from large-volume lattice simulations. One of the most important ingredients of this analysis is the non-abelian quark-gluon vertex, which controls the way the ghost sector enters into the gap equation. Specifically, this vertex introduces a numerically crucial dependence on the ghost dressing function and the quark-ghost scattering amplitude. This latter quantity satisfies its own, previously unexplored, dynamical equation, which may be decomposed into individual integral equations for its various form factors. In particular, the scalar form factor is obtained from an approximate version of the "one-loop dressed" integral equation, and its numerical impact turns out to be rather considerable. The detailed numerical analysis of the resulting gap equation reveals that the constituent quark mass obtained is about 300 MeV, while fermions in the adjoint representation acquire a mass in the range of (750-962) MeV.Comment: 32 pages, 13 figure