Lifting the Gribov ambiguity in Yang-Mills theories

We report on the work presented in Phys. Lett. B712 (2012) 97, where a new one-parameter family of Landau gauges has been proposed for Yang-Mills theories, inspired by an analogy with disordered systems in condensed matter physics. This is based on a particular average over Gribov copies which avoids the Neuberger zero problem of the standard Fadeev-Popov construction. The proposed gauge fixing can be formulated as a local renormalizable field theory in four dimensions and is well-suited for analytical calculations. A remarkable feature is that, for what concerns the calculation of ghost and gauge field correlators, the gauged-fixed action is perturbatively equivalent to a simple massive extension of the Faddeev-Popov action. The renormalization group flow of the theory admits infrared safe trajectories, with no Landau pole. The one-loop calculations of Yang-Mills two-point correlators show remarkable agreement with lattice simulations all the way to the deep infrared.Comment: Contribution to the Xth conference on Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum, October 8-12, 2012, TUM Campus Garching, Munich, Germany; 8 pages, 2 figure

Renormalization group flow and symmetry restoration in de Sitter space

We compute the renormalization group flow of O(N) scalar field theories in de Sitter space using nonperturbative renormalization group techniques in the local potential approximation. We obtain the flow of the effective potential on superhorizon scales for arbitrary space-time dimension D=d+1. We show that, due to strong infrared fluctuations, the latter is qualitatively similar to the corresponding one in Euclidean space with D=0. It follows that spontaneously broken symmetries are radiatively restored in any space-time dimension and for any value of N.Comment: 5 pages; 1 figure, minor corrections (published version

Nonperturbative infrared enhancement of nonGaussian correlators in de Sitter space

We compute the four-point correlation function of a light O(N) scalar field in de Sitter space in the large-N limit. For superhorizon momentum modes, infrared effects strongly enhance the size of loop contributions. We find that in the deep infrared limit, the latter are of the same order as the tree-level one. The tree-level momentum structure, characteristic of a contact term, gets renormalized by a factor of order unity. In addition loop contributions give rise to a new momentum structure, characteristic of an exchange diagram, corresponding to the exchange of an effective composite scalar degree of freedom.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. Material added. To appear in Phys. Lett.

Infrared dynamics in de Sitter space from Schwinger-Dyson equations

We study the two-point correlator of an O(N) scalar field with quartic self-coupling in de Sitter space. For light fields in units of the expansion rate, perturbation theory is plagued by large logarithmic terms for superhorizon momenta. We show that a proper treatment of the infinite series of self-energy insertions through the Schwinger-Dyson equations resums these infrared logarithms into well defined power laws. We provide an exact analytical solution of the Schwinger-Dyson equations for infrared momenta when the self-energy is computed at two-loop order. The obtained correlator exhibits a rich structure with a superposition of free-field-like power laws. We extract mass and field-strength renormalization factors from the asymptotic infrared behavior. The latter are nonperturbative in the coupling in the case of a vanishing tree-level mass.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, published version, some material has been added, title change

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

The Likelihood of DCC Formation

We estimate the probability that a disoriented chiral condensate forms during the spherical expansion of a hot medium described by the linear sigma model.Comment: 12 pages, latex2e, 2 figures in postscript, uses (included) boldgreek.sty and standard epsf packages, reference adde

Small parameters in infrared QCD: The pion decay constant

We continue our investigation of the QCD dynamics in terms of the Curci-Ferrari effective Lagrangian, a deformation of the Faddeev-Popov one in the Landau gauge with a tree-level gluon mass term. In a previous work we have studied the dynamics of chiral symmetry breaking at the level of the quark propagator and, in particular, the dynamical generation of a constituent quark mass. In the present article, we study the associated Goldstone mode, the pion, and we compute the pion decay constant in the chiral limit. Our approach exploits the fact that the coupling (defined in the Taylor scheme) in the pure gauge sector is perturbative, as observed in lattice simulations which, together with a $1/N_c$-expansion, allows for a systematic, controllable approximation scheme in the low energy regime of QCD. At leading order, this leads to the well-known rainbow-ladder resummation. We study the region of parameter space of the model that gives physical values of the pion decay constant. This allows one to constrain the gluon mass parameter as a function of the coupling using a physically measured quantity.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figure