Gribov copies, avalanches and dynamic generation of a gluon mass

Analytic calculations in the infrared regime of nonabelian gauge theories are hampered by the presence of Gribov copies which results in some ambiguity in the gauge-fixing procedure. This problem shares strong similarities with the issue of finding the true ground state among a large number of metastable states, a typical situation in the field of statistical physics of disordered systems. Building on this analogy, we propose a new gauge-fixing procedure which, we argue, makes more explicit the influence of the Gribov copies. A 1-loop calculation shows that the dynamics of these copies can lead to the spontaneous generation of a gauge-dependent gluon mass.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Influence of Gribov ambiguities in a class of nonlinear covariant gauges

We consider Yang-Mills theories in a recently proposed family of nonlinear covariant gauges that consistently deals with the issue of Gribov ambiguities. Such gauges provide a generalization of the Curci-Ferrari-Delbourgo-Jarvis gauges which can be formulated as an extremization procedure and might be implemented in numerical calculations. This would allow for nonperturbative studies of Yang-Mills correlators in a broad class of covariant gauges continuously connected to the well-studied Landau gauge. We compute the ghost and gluon propagators in the continuum formulation at one-loop order in perturbation theory and we study their momentum dependence down to the deep infrared regime, with and without renormalization group improvement. In particular, we show that the theory admits infrared-safe renormalization-group trajectories with no Landau pole. Both the gluon and the ghost behave as massive fields at low energy, and the gluon propagator is transverse even away from the Landau gauge limit. We compare our results to those obtained in the usual Curci-Ferrari model, which allows us to pinpoint the specific effects arising from our treatment of Gribov copies.Comment: 23 pages. 24 figures. One suplemental material: Mathematica file with the full expressions of the one-loop Feynman diagram