Gauge-invariant three-gluon vertex in QCD

Empirical Consequences of Emergent Mass

The Lagrangian that defines quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the strong interaction piece of the Standard Model, appears very simple. Nevertheless, it is responsible for an astonishing array of high-level phenomena with enormous apparent complexity, e.g., the existence, number and structure of atomic nuclei. The source of all these things can be traced to emergent mass, which might itself be QCD’s self-stabilising mechanism. A background to this perspective is provided, presenting, inter alia, a discussion of the gluon mass and QCD’s process-independent effective charge and highlighting an array of observable expressions of emergent mass, ranging from its manifestations in pion parton distributions to those in nucleon electromagnetic form factors.

Form factor decompositions of the QCD four - gluon vertex

The Bern-Kosower formalism, originally developed around 1990 as a novel way of obtaining on-shell amplitudes in field theory as limits of string amplitudes, has recently been shown to be extremely effcient as a tool for obtaining form factor decompositions of the N - gluon vertices. Its main advantages are that gauge invariant structures can be generated by certain systematic integration-by-parts procedures, making unnecessary the usual tedious analysis of the non-abelian off-shell Ward identities, and that the scalar, spinor and gluon loop cases can be treated in a unified way. After discussing the method in general for the N - gluon case, I will show in detail how to rederive the Ball- Chiu decomposition of the three - gluon vertex, and finally present two slightly different decompositions of the four - gluon vertex, one generalizing the Ball Chiu one, the other one closely linked to the QCD effective action.

Relating a gluon mass scale to an infrared fixed point in pure gauge QCD

We show that in pure gauge QCD (or any pure non-Abelian gauge theory) the condition for the existence of a global minimum of energy with a gluon (gauge boson) mass scale also implies the existence of a fixed point of the beta function. We argue that the frozen value of the coupling constant found in some solutions of the Schwinger-Dyson equations of QCD can be related to this fixed point. We also discuss how the inclusion of fermions modifies this property.

Observability of the neutrino charge radius

It is shown that the probe-independent charge radius of the neutrino is a physical observable; as such, it may be extracted from experiment, at least in principle. This is accomplished by expressing a set of experimental nu(mu)-e cross sections in terms of the finite charge radius and two additional gauge- and renormalization-group-invariant quantities, corresponding to the electroweak effective charge and mixing angle.

The pinch technique at two loops

It is shown that the fundamental properties of gauge independence, gauge invariance, unitarity, and analyticity of the S matrix lead to the unambiguous generalization of the pinch technique algorithm to two loops.