II. The mass gap and solution of the quark confinement problem in QCD

TL;DR

This paper presents an exact solution to a system of equations in low-energy QCD that demonstrates quark confinement and chiral symmetry breaking, using a novel analytical formalism for both light and heavy quarks.

Contribution

It introduces a new analytical approach to solve the quark propagator equations, establishing confinement and chiral symmetry breaking, and develops formalisms for light and heavy quark mass expansions.

Findings

Quark propagator has no pole, indicating confinement.

Chiral symmetry is dynamically broken in the solutions.

Heavy quark propagator approximates the free propagator up to order 1/m_Q^3.

Abstract

We have investigated a closed system of equations for the quark propagator, obtained earlier within our general approach to QCD at low energies. It implies quark confinement (the quark propagator has no pole, indeed), as well as the dynamical breakdown of chiral symmetry (a chiral symmetry preserving solution is forbidded). This system can be solved exactly in the chiral limit. We have established the space of the smooth test functions (consisting of the Green's functions for the quark propagator and the corresponding quark-gluon vertex) in which our generalized function (the confining gluon propagator) becomes a continuous linear functional. It is a linear topological space $K(c)$ of the infinitely differentiable functions (with respect to the dimensionless momentum variable $x$), having compact support in the region $x \leq c$. We develop an analytical formalism, the so-called chiral perturbtion theory at the fundamental quark level, which allows one to find explicit solution for the quark propagator in powers of the light quark masses. We also develop an analytical formalism, which allows one to find the solution for the quark propagator in the inverse powers of the heavy quark masses. It justifies the use for the heavy quark propagator its free counterpart up to terms of the order $1/m_Q^3$, where $m_Q$ is the heavy quark mass. So this solution automatically possesses the heavy quark spin-flavor symmetry.