Mass generation in Yang-Mills theories ^*

¹ Department of Theoretical Physics and IFIC, University of Valencia and CSIC, E-46100, Valencia, Spain
² University of Campinas - UNICAMP, Institute of Physics “Gleb Wataghin”, 13083-859 Campinas, SP, Brazil
³ European Centre for Theoretical Studies in Nuclear Physics and Related Areas (ECT*) and Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Villa Tambosi, Strada delle Tabarelle 286, I-38123 Villazzano (TN) Italy

^a e-mail: Joannis.Papavassiliou@uv.es

Published online: 5 December 2017

Abstract

In this talk we review recent progress on our understanding of the nonperturbative phenomenon of mass generation in non-Abelian gauge theories, and the way it manifests itself at the level of the gluon propagator, thus establishing a close contact with a variety of results obtained in large-volume lattice simulations. The key observation is that, due to an exact cancellation operating at the level of the Schwinger-Dyson equations, the gluon propagator remains rigorously massless, provided that the fully-dressed vertices of the theory do not contain massless poles. The inclusion of such poles activates the well-known Schwinger mechanism, which permits the evasion of the aforementioned cancellation, and accounts for the observed infrared finiteness of the gluon propagator both in the Landau gauge and away from it.