TY  - JOUR
AU  - Ferreira, Mauricio N.
AU  - Papavassiliou, Joannis
AU  - Pawlowski, Jan M.
AU  - Wink, Nicolas
TI  - Physics of the gluon mass gap
JO  - The European physical journal / C
VL  - 85
IS  - 11
SN  - 1434-6044
CY  - Heidelberg
PB  - Springer
M1  - GSI-2026-00281
M1  - 2508.20568
SP  - 1339
PY  - 2025
N1  - "This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Funded by SCOAP3."
AB  - It has long been known that the gluon propagator in Landau-gauge QCD exhibits a mass gap; and its emergence has been ascribed to the action of the Schwinger mechanism in the gauge sector of QCD. In the present work, we relate this property to the physical mass gap of QCD by considering two observables associated with confinement and chiral symmetry breaking, namely the confinement-deconfinement transition temperature and the pion decay constant, respectively. It turns out that the first observable is linearly proportional to the gluon mass gap, a fact that allows us to assign a direct physical meaning to this scale. Moreover, we identify three distinct momentum regimes in the gluon propagator, ultraviolet, intermediate, and deep infrared, and assess their impact on the aforementioned observables. Both observables are sensitive to the first two regions of momenta, where functional approaches essentially coincide, but are insensitive to the third, deep infrared, regime. The combined information is used for a simple fit for the gluon propagator, all of whose parameters admit a clear physical interpretation. Finally, we discuss how this fit can help us access the intertwined dynamics of confinement and chiral symmetry breaking in QCD-type theories.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:001620913500002
DO  - DOI:10.1140/epjc/s10052-025-15027-7
UR  - https://repository.gsi.de/record/364102
ER  -