The non-perturbative structure of the photon and gluon propagators

Abstract

The non-perturbative structure of the photon and gluon propagators plays an important role in governing the dynamics of quantum electrodynamics (QED) and quantum chromodynamics (QCD) respectively. Although it is often assumed that these interacting field propagators can be decomposed into longitudinal and transverse components, as for the free case, it turns out that in general this is not possible. Moreover, the non-abelian gauge symmetry of QCD permits the momentum space gluon propagator to contain additional singular terms involving derivatives of $\delta(p)$, the appearance of which is related to confinement. Despite the possibility of the failure of the transverse-longitudinal decomposition for the photon and gluon propagators, and the appearance of singular terms in the gluon propagator, the Slavnov-Taylor identity nevertheless remains preserved.