A Tachyonic Gluon Mass: Between Infrared and Ultraviolet

TL;DR

This paper explores a momentum-dependent tachyonic gluon mass induced by gluon interactions with a background gauge field, which vanishes in the ultraviolet and stabilizes in the infrared, aligning with confinement and phenomenological observations.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the stochastic vacuum model of QCD naturally predicts a gluon mass with properties consistent with phenomenological and sum rule discrepancies.

Findings

Gluon mass vanishes as 1/p^2 in the UV

Gluon mass stabilizes in the IR due to confinement

Model aligns with phenomenological tachyonic gluon mass usage

Abstract

The gluon spin coupling to a Gaussian correlated background gauge field induces an effective tachyonic gluon mass. It is momentum dependent and vanishes in the UV only like 1/p^2. In the IR, we obtain stabilization through a positive m^2_{conf}(p^2) related to confinement. Recently a purely phenomenological tachyonic gluon mass was used to explain the linear rise in the q\bar q static potential at small distances and also some long standing discrepancies found in QCD sum rules. We show that the stochastic vacuum model of QCD predicts a gluon mass with the desired properties.