The Infrared Behaviour of the Pure Yang-Mills Green Functions

We study the infrared behaviour of the pure Yang-Mills correlators using relations that are well defined in the non-perturbative domain. These are the Slavnov-Taylor identity for three-gluon vertex and the Schwinger-Dyson equation for ghost propagator in the Landau gauge. We also use several inputs from lattice simulations. We show that lattice data are in serious conflict with a widely spread analytical relation between the gluon and ghost infrared critical exponents. We conjecture that this is explained by a singular behaviour of the ghost-ghost-gluon vertex function in the infrared. We show that, anyhow, this discrepancy is not due to some lattice artefact since lattice Green functions satisfy the ghost propagator Schwinger-Dyson equation. We also report on a puzzle concerning the infrared gluon propagator: lattice data seem to favor a constant non vanishing zero momentum gluon propagator, while the Slavnov-Taylor identity (complemented with some regularity hypothesis of scalar functions) implies that it should diverge.Comment: 25 pages, 7 figures; replaced version with some references adde and an enlarged discussion of the non-renormalization theorem; second replacement with improved figures and added reference

Asymptotic behavior of the ghost propagator in SU3 lattice gauge theory

We study the asymptotic behavior of the ghost propagator in the quenched SU(3) lattice gauge theory with Wilson action. The study is performed on lattices with a physical volume fixed around 1.6 fm and different lattice spacings: 0.100 fm, 0.070 fm and 0.055 fm. We implement an efficient algorithm for computing the Faddeev-Popov operator on the lattice. We are able to extrapolate the lattice data for the ghost propagator towards the continuum and to show that the extrapolated data on each lattice can be described up to four-loop perturbation theory from 2.0 GeV to 6.0 GeV. The three-loop values are consistent with those extracted from previous perturbative studies of the gluon propagator. However the effective \Lambda_{\ms} scale which reproduces the data does depend strongly upon the order of perturbation theory and on the renormalization scheme used in the parametrization. We show how the truncation of the perturbative series can account for the magnitude of the dependency in this energy range. The contribution of non-perturbative corrections will be discussed elsewhere.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figure

Dpes massless QCD have vacuum energy?

It is widely thought that this question has a positive answer, but we argue that the support for this belief from both experiment and theory is weak or nonexistent. We then list some of the ramifications of a negative answer.Comment: 8 pages, no figures, version to appear in NJ

Infrared Properties of QCD from Dyson-Schwinger equations

I review recent results on the infrared properties of QCD from Dyson-Schwinger equations. The topics include infrared exponents of one-particle irreducible Green's functions, the fixed point behaviour of the running coupling at zero momentum, the pattern of dynamical quark mass generation and properties of light mesons.Comment: 47 pages, 19 figures, Topical Review to be published in J.Phys.G, v2: typos corrected and some references adde

The Infrared Behaviour of the Pure Yang-Mills Green Functions

22 pages, 6 figuresWe study the infrared behaviour of the pure Yang-Mills correlators using relations that are well defined in the non-perturbative domain. These are the Slavnov-Taylor identity for three-gluon vertex and the Schwinger-Dyson equation for ghost propagator in the Landau gauge. We also use several inputs from lattice simulations. We show that lattice data are in serious conflict with a widely spread analytical relation between the gluon and ghost infrared critical exponents. We conjecture that this is explained by a singular behaviour of the ghost-ghost-gluon vertex function in the infrared. We show that, anyhow, this discrepancy is not due to some lattice artefact since lattice Green functions satisfy the ghost propagator Schwinger-Dyson equation. We also report on a puzzle concerning the infrared gluon propagator: lattice data seem to favor a constant non vanishing zero momentum gluon propagator, while the Slavnov-Taylor identity (complemented with some regularity hypothesis of scalar functions) implies that it should diverge