arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Reinhard Alkofer.
Employing an approach based on the Green functions of Landau-gauge QCD, some selected results from a calculation of meson and baryon properties are presented. A rainbow-ladder truncation to the quark Dyson-Schwinger equation is used to arrive at a unified description of mesons and baryons by solving Bethe-Salpeter and covariant Faddeev equations, respectively.
We investigate non-perturbative pair production from vacuum (the Schwinger effect) in the focal region of two counter-propagating, ultra-short laser pulses with sub-cycle structure. We use the quantum kinetic formulation to calculate the momentum spectrum of created particles and show the extreme sensitivity to the laser frequency $ω$, the pulse length $τ$ and the carrier-envelope absolute phase $ϕ$. We apply this formalism to both fermions and bosons to illustrate the influence of quantum statistics in this type of electric background field.
The connection between the Hamilton and the standard Lagrange formalism is established for a generic Quantum Field Theory with vanishing vacuum expectation values of the fundamental fields. The Effective Actions in both formalisms are the same if and only if the fundamental fields and the momentum fields are related by the stationarity condition. These momentum fields in general differ from the canonical fields as defined via the Effective Action. By means of functional methods a systematic procedure is presented to identify the full correlation functions, which depend on the momentum fields, as functionals of those usually appearing in the standard Lagrange formalism. Whereas Lagrange correlation functions can be decomposed into tree diagrams the decomposition of Hamilton correlation functions involves loop corrections similar to those arising in n-particle effective actions. To demonstrate the method we derive for theories with linearized interactions the propagators of composite auxiliary fields and the ones of the fundamental degrees of freedom. The formalism is then utilized in the case of Coulomb gauge Yang-Mills theory for which the relations between the two-point correlation functions of the transversal and longitudinal components of the conjugate momentum to the ones of the gauge field are given.
Some of the difficulties arising when one tries to understand confinement as well as dynamical and anomalous chiral symmetry breaking are reviewed. Criteria to be fulfilled by a successful and complete picture of these phenomena are presented, and a few of the suggested explanations are listed.
Analytic solutions for the three-gluon and ghost-gluon vertices in Landau gauge Yang-Mills theory at low momenta are presented in terms of hypergeometric series. They do not only show the expected scaling behavior but also additional kinematic divergences when only one momentum goes to zero. These singularities, which have also been proposed previously, induce a strong dependence on the kinematics in many dressing functions. The results are generalized to two and three dimensions and a range of values for the ghost propagator's infrared exponent kappa.
The non-perturbative domain of QCD contains confinement, chiral symmetry breaking, and the bound state spectrum. For the calculation of the latter, the Coulomb gauge is particularly well-suited. Access to these non-perturbative properties should be possible by means of the Green's functions. However, Coulomb gauge is also very involved, and thus hard to tackle. We introduce a novel BRST-type operator r, and show that the left-hand side of Gauss' law is r-exact. We investigate a possible truncation scheme of the Dyson-Schwinger equations in first-order formalism for the propagators based on an instantaneous approximation. We demonstrate that this is insufficient to obtain solutions with the expected property of a linear-rising Coulomb potential. We also show systematically that a class of possible vertex dressings does not change this result.
We investigate electron-positron pair production from vacuum for short laser pulses with sub-cycle structure, in the nonperturbative regime (Schwinger pair production). We use the non-equilibrium quantum kinetic approach, and show that the momentum spectrum of the created electron-positron pairs is extremely sensitive to the sub-cycle dynamics -- depending on the laser frequency $ω$, the pulse length $τ$, and the carrier phase $ϕ$ -- and shows several distinctive new signatures. This observation could help not only in the design of laser pulses to optimize the experimental signature of Schwinger pair production, but also ultimately lead to new probes of light pulses at extremely short time scales.
The three-gluon and ghost-gluon vertices of Landau gauge Yang-Mills theory are investigated in the low momentum regime. Due to ghost dominance in the infrared we can use the known power law behavior for the propagators to determine analytically the complete momentum dependence of the dressing functions. Besides a uniform, i. e. all momenta going to zero, divergence, we find additional singularities, if one momentum alone goes to zero, while the other two remain constant. At these asymmetric points we can extract additional infrared exponents, which corroborate previous results and expand the known fixed point solution of Landau gauge Yang-Mills theory, where the uniform infrared exponents for all vertex functions are known. Calculations in two and three dimensions yield qualitatively similar results.
We present selected results from a calculation of meson and nucleon observables in a Green-function approach. A rainbow-ladder truncation of QCD's Dyson-Schwinger equations is used to solve the respective meson, diquark and quark-diquark Bethe-Salpeter equations. It allows for a simultaneous description of meson and nucleon masses and electromagnetic properties from an effective quark-gluon interaction. The results describe a hadronic quark core which agrees with lattice data for heavy quarks whereas pion-cloud effects are missing towards the chiral limit. The neutron's Dirac form factor is negative due to the presence of axial-vector diquark correlations.
In a functional approach to QCD the infrared behaviour of Landau gauge Green functions is investigated. Positivity violation for, and thus confinement of, gluons is demonstrated, and the analytic structure of the gluon propagator is studied. Quark confinement is related to an infrared divergence of the quark-gluon vertex. In the latter various components are dynamically induced due to the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry. As a result an infrared finite running coupling in the Yang-Mills sector is derived whereas the running coupling related to the quark-gluon vertex is infrared divergent. Based on a truncation for the quark-gluon vertex Dyson-Schwinger equation, which respects the analytically determined infrared behavior, numerical results for the coupled system of the quark propagator and vertex Dyson-Schwinger equations are presented. The resulting quark mass function as well as the vertex function show only a very weak dependence on the current quark mass in the deep infrared. From this we infer by an analysis of the quark-quark scattering kernel a linearly rising quark potential with an almost mass independent string tension in the case of broken chiral symmetry.
We present an algorithm for the derivation of Dyson-Schwinger equations of general theories that is suitable for an implementation within a symbolic programming language. Moreover, we introduce the Mathematica package DoDSE which provides such an implementation. It derives the Dyson-Schwinger equations graphically once the interactions of the theory are specified. A few examples for the application of both the algorithm and the DoDSE package are provided. The package can be obtained from physik.uni-graz.at/~mah/DoDSE.html.
We investigate electron-positron pair production in pulse-shaped electric background fields using a non-Markovian quantum kinetic equation. We identify a pulse-length range for subcritical fields still in the nonperturbative regime where the number of produced pairs significantly exceeds that of a naive expectation based on the Schwinger formula. From a conceptual viewpoint, we find a remarkable quantitative agreement between the (real-time) quantum kinetic approach and the (imaginary-time) effective action approach.
The $U_A(1)$ problem of QCD is inevitably tied to the infrared behaviour of quarks and gluons with its most visible effect being the $η^\prime$ mass. A dimensional argument of Kogut and Susskind showed that the mixing of the pseudoscalar flavour-singlet mesons with gluons can provide a screening of the Goldstone pole in this channel if the full quark-quark interaction is strongly infrared singular as $\sim 1/k^4$. We investigate this idea using previously obtained results for the Landau gauge ghost and gluon propagator, together with recent determinations for the singular behaviour of the quark-gluon vertex. We find that, even with an infrared vanishing gluon propagator, the singular structure of the quark-gluon vertex for certain kinematics is apposite for yielding a non-zero screening mass.
We employ a functional approach to investigate the confinement problem in quenched Landau gauge QCD. We demonstrate analytically that a linear rising potential between massive quarks is generated by infrared singularities in the dressed quark-gluon vertex. The selfconsistent mechanism that generates these singularities is driven by the scalar Dirac amplitudes of the full vertex and the quark propagator. These can only be present when chiral symmetry is broken. We have thus uncovered a novel mechanism that directly links chiral symmetry breaking with confinement.
The infrared behavior of the quark-gluon vertex of quenched Landau gauge QCD is studied by analyzing its Dyson-Schwinger equation. Building on previously obtained results for Green functions in the Yang-Mills sector we analytically derive the existence of power-law infrared singularities for this vertex. We establish that dynamical chiral symmetry breaking leads to the self-consistent generation of components of the quark-gluon vertex forbidden when chiral symmetry is forced to stay in the Wigner-Weyl mode. In the latter case the running strong coupling assumes an infrared fixed point. If chiral symmetry is broken, either dynamically or explicitely, the running coupling is infrared divergent. Based on a truncation for the quark-gluon vertex Dyson-Schwinger equation which respects the analytically determined infrared behavior numerical results for the coupled system of the quark propagator and vertex Dyson-Schwinger equation are presented. The resulting quark mass function as well as the vertex function show only a very weak dependence on the current quark mass in the deep infrared. From this we infer by an analysis of the quark-quark scattering kernel a linearly rising quark potential with an almost mass independent string tension in the case of broken chiral symmetry. Enforcing chiral symmetry does lead to a Coulomb type potential. Therefore we conclude that chiral symmetry breaking and confinement are closely related. Furthermore we discuss aspects of confinement as the absence of long-range van-der-Waals forces and Casimir scaling. An examination of experimental data for quarkonia provides further evidence for the viability of the presented mechanism for quark confinement in the Landau gauge.
The role of neutrality constraints for the phase structure of QCD at non-vanishing chemical potentials is studied within a self-consistent truncation scheme for the Dyson-Schwinger equation of the quark propagator in Landau gauge. We find the (approximate) color-flavor-locked phase to be energetically preferred at all potentially relevant densities and for physical values of the quark masses. We furthermore observe the impossibility to define this phase by residual global symmetries and discuss the role of chemical potentials.
We develop a general power counting scheme for the infrared limit of Landau gauge SU(N) Yang-Mills theory in arbitrary dimensions. Employing a skeleton expansion, we find that the infrared behavior is qualitatively independent of the spacetime dimension d. In the cases d=2, 3 and 4 even the quantitative results for the infrared exponents of the vertices differ only slightly. Therefore, corresponding lattice simulations provide interesting qualitative information for the physical case. We furthermore find that the loop integrals depend only weakly on the numerical values of the IR exponents.
We summarize recent results on the nonperturbative quark-gluon interaction in Landau gauge QCD. Our analytical analysis of the infrared behaviour of the quark-gluon vertex reveals infrared singularities, which lead to an infrared divergent running coupling and a linear rising quark-antiquark potential when chiral symmetry is broken. In the chirally symmetric case we find an infrared fixed point of the coupling and, correspondingly, a Coulomb potential. These findings provide a new link betwen dynamical chiral symmetry breaking and confinement.