Infrared scaling solutions beyond the Landau gauge: The maximally Abelian gauge and Abelian infrared dominance

Functional equations like exact renormalization group and Dyson-Schwinger equations have contributed to a better understanding of non-perturbative phenomena in quantum field theories in terms of the underlying Green functions. In Yang-Mills theory especially the Landau gauge has been used, as it is the most accessible gauge for these methods. The growing understanding obtained in this gauge allows to proceed to other gauges in order to obtain more information about the relation of different realizations of the confinement mechanism. In the maximally Abelian gauge first results are very encouraging as a variant of Abelian infrared dominance is found: The Abelian part of the gauge field propagator is enhanced at low momenta and thereby dominates the dynamics in the infrared. Its role is therefore similar to that of the ghost propagator in the Landau gauge, where one denotes the corresponding phenomenon as ghost dominance. Also the ambiguity of two different types of solutions (decoupling and scaling) exists in both gauges. Here we present how the two solutions are related in the maximally Abelian gauge. The intricacy of the system of functional equations in this gauge required the development of some new tools and methods as, for example, the automated derivation of the equations by the program DoFun. We also present results for linear covariant and ghost anti-ghost symmetric gauges.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of The Many faces of QCD, Nov. 1-5 2010, Ghent, Belgiu

On the Analytic Structure of Scalar Glueball Operators

The correlator of the square of the Yang-Mills field-strength tensor corresponds to a scalar glueball, i.e., to a bound-state formed by gluonic ingredients only. It has quantum numbers 0++ and its mass, as predicted by different theoretical approaches, is expected to lie between 1 and 2 GeV. Here we restrict our considerations to the Born level, that is, we consider the correlator to zeroth order in the coupling. Gluonic self-interaction is taken into account indirectly by using non-perturbative gluon propagators. The employed closed expressions are motivated by lattice and Dyson-Schwinger studies. The analytic continuation of the integrals themselves is complicated by additional obstructive structures like branch cuts and poles that are induced by the inner integral in the complex plane of the outer integration variable. We deal with this problem by deforming the outer integration contour accordingly. For different input gluon propagators we find a positive glueball spectral density which is required for physical states. Poles are, however, absent which is most likely an artifact of working at Born level.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Non-perturbative analysis of the Gribov-Zwanziger action

In the non-perturbative regime the usual gauge fixing is not sufficient due to the Gribov problem. To deal with it one can restrict the integration in the path integral to the first Gribov region by using the Gribov-Zwanziger action. In its local form it features additional auxiliary fields which mix with the gluon at the two-point level. We present an explicit infrared analysis of this action. We show that from the two possible scaling solutions obtained previously only one remains: It coincides exactly with the results from the Faddeev-Popov action, i.e., the ghost propagator is infrared enhanced and the gluon propagator infrared suppressed and the corresponding power law behavior is described by only one parameter kappa=0.5953. This corroborates the argument by Zwanziger that for functional equations it suffices to take into account the appropriate boundary conditions and no explicit restriction in the path integral measure is required.Comment: 3 pages, talk at the Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum IX Conference, August 30 - September 3, 2010, Madri

Three-point vertex functions in Yang-Mills Theory and QCD in Landau gauge

Solutions for the three-gluon and quark-gluon vertices from Dyson-Schwinger equations and the three-particle irreducible formalism are discussed. Dynamical quarks (``unquenching'') change the three-gluon vertex via the quark-triangle diagrams which themselves include fully dressed quark-gluon vertex functions. On the other hand, the quark-swordfish diagram is, at least with the model used for the two-quark-two-gluon vertex employed here, of minor importance. For the leading tensor structure of the three-gluon vertex the "unquenching" effect can be summarized for the nonperturbative part as a shift of the related dressing function towards the infrared.Comment: Talk given by Adrian L. Blum at XIIth Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum, August 28 - September 04, 2016, Thessaloniki, Greec

Lower dimensional Yang-Mills theory as a laboratory to study the infrared regime

Lattice studies of the infrared regime of gauge theories are complicated by the required extensive limits, the performed gauge fixing and the demand for high statistics. Using a general power counting scheme for the infrared limit of Landau gauge SU(N) Yang-Mills theory in arbitrary dimensions we show that the infrared behavior of Greens functions is both qualitatively and quantitatively similar in two, three and four spacetime dimensions. Therefore, lower dimensional lattice simulations can serve as a simplified laboratory to analyze the presently applied approximations and to obtain first results for higher correlation functions.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures; talk presented at Lattice 200