Confinement and Mass Gap in Abelian Gauge

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple confining abelian gauge theory with a condensate leading to a vanishing wave function normalization, and extends the analysis to SU(2) Yang-Mills theory, showing how confinement and mass gap phenomena emerge.

Contribution

It presents a novel abelian gauge model with a condensate mechanism for confinement and explores its connection to SU(2) Yang-Mills theory with a BRST invariant condensate.

Findings

The abelian model exhibits confinement with a vanishing wave function normalization.

In SU(2) Yang-Mills, the low-energy effective theory reduces to the confining abelian model.

The condensate vev scales correctly with the renormalization point, supporting the confinement mechanism.

Abstract

First, we present a simple confining abelian pure gauge theory. Classically, its kinetic term is not positive definite, and it contains a simple UV regularized F^4 interaction. This provoques the formation of a condensate ~ F^2 such that, at the saddle point of the effective potential, the wave function normalization constant of the abelian gauge fields vanishes exactly. Then we study SU(2) pure Yang-Mills theory in an abelian gauge and introduce an additional auxiliary field for a BRST invariant condensate of dimension 2, which renders the charged sector massive. Under simple assumptions its effective low energy theory reduces to the confining abelian model discussed before, and the vev of rho is seen to scale correctly with the renormalization point. Under these assumptions, the confinement condition Z_eff = 0 also holds for the massive charged sector, which suppresses the couplings of the charged fields to the abelian gauge bosons in the infrared regime.