Gluon condensates and effective gluon mass

TL;DR

This paper provides an analytic explanation for the effective gluon mass observed in non-perturbative QCD, linking gluon condensation to a dynamical Higgs mechanism and confirming results with lattice simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a dynamical Higgs mechanism framework to understand gluon mass generation via gluon condensates in covariant gauges.

Findings

Gluon effective mass aligns with lattice results.

Color condensates emerge as a consequence of gluon condensation.

The approach predicts a gluon mass consistent with other dynamical models.

Abstract

Lattice simulations along with studies in continuum QCD indicate that non-perturbative quantum fluctuations lead to an infrared regularisation of the gluon propagator in covariant gauges in the form of an effective mass-like behaviour. In the present work we propose an analytic understanding of this phenomenon in terms of gluon condensation through a dynamical version of the Higgs mechanism, leading to the emergence of color condensates. Within the functional renormalisation group approach we compute the effective potential of covariantly constant field strengths, whose non-trivial minimum is related to the color condensates. In the physical case of an SU(3) gauge group this is an octet condensate. The value of the gluon mass obtained through this procedure compares very well to lattice results and the mass gap arising from alternative dynamical scenarios.