Kugo-Ojima confinement and QCD Green's functions in covariant gauges

Abstract

In Landau gauge QCD the Kugo-Ojima confinement criterion and its relations to the infrared behaviour of the gluon and ghost propagators are reviewed. It is demonstrated that the realization of this confinement criterion (which is closely related to the Gribov-Zwanziger horizon condition) results from quite general properties of the ghost Dyson-Schwinger equation. The numerical solutions for the gluon and ghost propagators obtained from a truncated set of Dyson-Schwinger equations provide an explicit example for the anticipated infrared behaviour. The results are in good agreement, also quantitatively, with corresponding lattice data obtained recently. The resulting running coupling approaches a fixed point in the infrared, α(0) = 8.915 N c . Solutions for the coupled system of Dyson-Schwinger equations for the quark, gluon and ghost propagators are presented. Dynamical generation of quark masses and thus spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry takes place. In the quenched approximation the quark propagator functions agree well with those of corresponding lattice calculations. For a small number of light flavours the quark, gluon and ghost propagators deviate only slightly from the ones in quenched approximation. While the positivity violation of the gluon spectral function is manifest in the gluon propagator, there are no clear indications of analogous positivity violations for quarks so far.