Nonlinear Gauge, Stochasticity and Confinement

TL;DR

This paper clarifies and corrects previous work on non-linear gauge-fixing and quark confinement, demonstrating a mass gap for gluons and confinement of quarks through a new gauge decomposition and effective action analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a non-linear gauge condition that includes Coulomb gauge as a special case and provides a new gauge potential decomposition leading to confinement and a mass gap.

Findings

Gluons exhibit a mass gap in the non-linear gauge regime.

Quarks are confined with an effective linear potential.

The non-linear gauge includes Coulomb gauge in the high energy limit.

Abstract

I clarify, restate and show more clearly some key points I raised in a number of papers that discussed the non-linear gauge-fixing condition and quark confinement. I also correct some errors, which do not detract from the key findings, found in the original papers. However, there are two major corrections I will make in this paper, the first is on the proof of the Parisi-Sourlas mechanism and the second is on the effective action for the 'gluons', which leads to a direct proof of gluons being confined inside hadrons. The correction also leads to how the mass gap will be calculated, which was explicitly done in 2D. The starting point is that contrary to the prevailing ideas in the literature, the Coulomb gauge is an incomplete gauge-fixing condition in the sense that there are field configurations that cannot be gauge transformed to the Coulomb gauge. In other words the orbit of these configurations will not intersect the Coulomb gauge surface. I proposed the non-linear gauge condition precisely because it includes the Coulomb gauge in the high energy (short distance) regime and the quadratic regime (the large distance regime where the running coupling becomes large), where the gauge fields cannot be gauge transformed to the Coulomb surface. We proposed a new decomposition of the gauge potential in the non-linear regime, which involves an isoscalar (the divergence of the gauge field) and a new vector field, which exhibits a mass gap and confinement. When we add the quarks, we find that they are localized to a given distance scale and has an effective four-Fermi action with a linear potential. Thus, we have shown a mass gap for gluons and confinement for both dynamical quarks and gluons.