Schwinger mechanism for gluons from lattice QCD

A. C. Aguilar, F. De Soto, M. N. Ferreira, J. Papavassiliou, F. Pinto-Gómez, C. D. Roberts, J. Rodríguez-Quintero

Published 2022-11-22Version 1

Continuum and lattice analyses have revealed the existence of a mass-scale in the gluon two-point Schwinger function. It has long been conjectured that this expresses the action of a Schwinger mechanism for gauge boson mass generation in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). For such to be true, it is necessary and sufficient that a dynamically-generated, massless, colour-carrying, scalar gluon+gluon correlation emerge as a feature of the dressed three-gluon vertex. Working with results on elementary Schwinger functions obtained via the numerical simulation of lattice-regularised QCD, we establish with an extremely high level of confidence that just such a feature appears; hence, confirm the conjectured origin of the gluon mass scale.