Gluon Propagators and Confinement

TL;DR

This paper investigates SU(3) gluon propagators on large lattices at different temperatures, revealing distinct behaviors in confinement and deconfinement phases, with implications for understanding gluon mass dynamics.

Contribution

It provides detailed lattice calculations of gluon propagators in both phases, highlighting their differing mass-like behaviors and the non-physical nature of slope masses.

Findings

Gluon propagators exhibit massless behavior at small and large t in confinement phase.

Effective mass in G(z) increases with z, indicating non-physical poles.

Deconfinement phase shows less massive behavior compared to confinement phase.

Abstract

We present SU(3) gluon propagators calculated on 48*48*48*N_t lattices at beta=6.8 where N_t=64 (corresponding the confinement phase) and N_t=16 (deconfinement) with the bare gauge parameter,alpha, set to be 0.1. In order to avoid Gribov copies, we employ the stochastic gauge fixing algorithm. Gluon propagators show quite different behavior from those of massless gauge fields: (1) In the confinement phase, G(t) shows massless behavior at small and large t, while around 5<t<15 it behaves as massive particle, and (2) effective mass observed in G(z) becomes larger as z increases. (3) In the deconfinement phase, G(z) shows also massive behavior but effective mass is less than in the confinement case. In all cases, slope masses are increasing functions of t or z, which can not be understood as addtional physical poles.