Soft gluons are heavy and rowdy

Abstract

We study dynamical mass generation in pure Yang-Mills theory and report on a recently developed ansatz that exactly solves the tower of Dyson-Schwinger equations in Landau gauge at low Euclidean momentum, featuring enhanced gluon-gluon vertices, a finite ghost-gluon vertex in agreement with an old argument of Taylor, and an IR suppressed gluon propagator. This ansatz reinforces arguments in favor of the concept of a gluon mass gap at low momentum (although the minimum of the gluon's dispersion relation is not at zero momentum). As an application, we have computed the spectrum of oddballs, three-gluon glueballs with negative parity and C-parity. The three body problem is variationally solved employing the color density-density interaction of Coulomb gauge QCD with a static Cornell potential. Like their even glueball counterparts, oddballs fall on Regge trajectories with similar slope to the pomeron. However their intercept at t=0 is smaller than the omega Regge trajectory and therefore the odderon may only be visible in experimental searches (for example at BNL) with higher -t than conducted to date at DESY.