Description of Gluon Propagation in the Presence of an A^2 Condensate

Abstract

There is a good deal of current interest in the condensate A^2 which has been seen to play an important role in calculations which make use of the operator product expansion. That development has led to the publication of a large number of papers which discuss how that condensate could play a role in a gauge-invariant formulation. In the present work we consider gluon propagation in the presence of such a condensate which we assume to be present in the vacuum. We show that the gluon propagator has no on-mass-shell pole and, therefore, a gluon cannot propagate over extended distances. That is, the gluon is a nonpropagating mode in the gluon condensate. In the present work we discuss the properties of both the Euclidean-space and Minkowski-space gluon propagator. In the case of the Euclidean-space propagator we can make contact with the results of QCD lattice calculations of the propagator in the Landau gauge. With an appropriate choice of normalization constants, we present a unified representation of the gluon propagator that describes both the Minkowski-space and Euclidean-space dynamics in which the A^2 condensate plays an important role.