QCD Green Functions and their Application to Hadron Physics

TL;DR

This paper investigates the infrared behavior of Landau gauge Green functions in QCD using a functional approach, linking confinement, chiral symmetry breaking, and hadron properties, with implications for nucleon structure.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of QCD Green functions, their relation to confinement and chiral symmetry breaking, and develops a covariant Faddeev approach to nucleons based on these insights.

Findings

Demonstrates positivity violation for gluons

Derives an infrared finite running coupling in Yang-Mills sector

Calculates nucleon properties including form factors and magnetic moments

Abstract

In a functional approach to QCD the infrared behaviour of Landau gauge Green functions is investigated. It can be proven that the ghost Dyson-Schwinger equation implies the Gribov-Zwanziger horizon condition. Its relation to the Kugo-Ojima confinement scenario is elucidated. Positivity violation for gluons is demonstrated, and the analytic structure of the gluon propagator is studied. Quark confinement is related to an infrared divergence of the quark-gluon vertex. It is shown that in the latter various components are non-vanishing due to the dynamical breaking of chiral symmetry. As a result an infrared finite running coupling in the Yang-Mills sector is derived whereas the running coupling related to the quark-gluon vertex is infrared divergent. In Coulomb gauge QCD already the one-gluon-exchange (over-)confines. This leads to a vanishing quark propagator, and thus quarks are confined. Nevertheless colour singlet quantities derived from the quark propagator are well-defined. Especially the expression for the quark condensate proves that chiral symmetry is dynamically broken. As expected the properties of mesons can be directly calculated whereas the mass of coloured diquarks diverges, and thus diquarks are confined. The latter nevertheless possess a well-defined size. In the third part the results obtained so far will be used to formulate a covariant Faddeev approach to nucleons. The resulting amplitudes describe the quark core of the nucleon. Besides the mass of this state also the electromagnetic form factors are calculated. The results for charge radii and magnetic moments as a function of the quark current mass provide some indication what the missing pion cloud may contribute to the nucleons' properties.