The infrared behavior of lattice QCD Green's functions

Abstract

We investigate different aspects of lattice QCD in Landau gauge using Monte Carlo simulations. In particular, we focus on the low momentum behavior of gluon and ghost propagators. The gauge group is SU(3). Different systematic effects on the gluon and ghost propagators are studied, e.g. the dependence on the choice of Gribov copies or the influence of dynamical Wilson fermions. We compare our data with results from studies of Dyson-Schwinger equations for the gluon and ghost propagators. We demonstrate that the infrared behavior of both propagators, as found in this thesis, is consistent with different criteria for confinement. However, the running coupling constant, given as a renormalization-group-invariant combination of the gluon and ghost dressing functions, does not expose a finite infrared fixed point. We also report on a first nonperturbative computation of the SU(3) ghost-gluon-vertex renormalization constant and on an investigation of the spectral properties of the Faddeev-Popov operator.