We study the asymptotic behavior of the ghost propagator in the quenched SU(3) lattice gauge theory with Wilson action. The study is performed on lattices with a physical volume fixed around 1.6 fm and different lattice spacings: 0.100 fm, 0.070 fm and 0.055 fm. We implement an efficient algorithm for computing the Faddeev-Popov operator on the lattice. We are able to extrapolate the lattice data for the ghost propagator towards the continuum and to show that the extrapolated data on each lattice can be described up to four-loop perturbation theory from 2.0 GeV to 6.0 GeV. The three-loop values are consistent with those extracted from previous perturbative studies of the gluon propagator. However the effective $Lambda_{ms}$ scale which reproduces the data does depend strongly upon the order of perturbation theory and on the renormalization scheme used in the parametrization. We show how the truncation of the perturbative series can account for the magnitude of the dependency in this energy range. The contribution of non-perturbative corrections will be discussed elsewhere.
We present one- and two-loop results for the ghost propagator in Landau gauge calculated in Numerical Stochastic Perturbation Theory (NSPT). The one-loop results are compared with available standard Lattice Perturbation Theory in the infinite-volume limit. We discuss in detail how to perform the different necessary limits in the NSPT approach and discuss a recipe to treat logarithmic terms by introducing ``finite-lattice logs. We find agreement with the one-loop result from standard Lattice Perturbation Theory and estimate, from the non-logarithmic part of the ghost propagator in two-loop order, the unknown constant contribution to the ghost self-energy in the RI-MOM scheme in Landau gauge. That constant vanishes within our numerical accuracy.
The Bose-ghost propagator has been proposed as a carrier of the confining force in Yang-Mills theories in minimal Landau gauge. We present the first numerical evaluation of this propagator, using lattice simulations for the SU(2) gauge group in the scaling region. Our data are well described by a simple fitting function, which is compatible with an infrared-enhanced Bose-ghost propagator. This function can also be related to a massive gluon propagator in combination with an infrared-free (Faddeev-Popov) ghost propagator. Since the Bose-ghost propagator can be written as the vacuum expectation value of a BRST-exact quantity and should therefore vanish in a BRST-invariant theory, our results provide the first numerical manifestation of BRST-symmetry breaking due to restriction of gauge-configuration space to the Gribov region.
We complete our high-accuracy studies of the lattice ghost propagator in Landau gauge in Numerical Stochastic Perturbation Theory up to three loops. We present a systematic strategy which allows to extract with sufficient precision the non-logarithmic parts of logarithmically divergent quantities as a function of the propagator momentum squared in the infinite-volume and $ato 0$ limits. We find accurate coincidence with the one-loop result for the ghost self-energy known from standard Lattice Perturbation Theory and improve our previous estimate for the two-loop constant contribution to the ghost self-energy in Landau gauge. Our results for the perturbative ghost propagator are compared with Monte Carlo measurements of the ghost propagator performed by the Berlin Humboldt university group which has used the exponential relation between potentials and gauge links.
We present numerical details of the evaluation of the so-called Bose-ghost propagator in lattice minimal Landau gauge, for the SU(2) case in four Euclidean dimensions. This quantity has been proposed as a carrier of the confining force in the Gribov-Zwanziger approach and, as such, its infrared behavior could be relevant for the understanding of color confinement in Yang-Mills theories. Also, its nonzero value can be interpreted as direct evidence of BRST-symmetry breaking, which is induced when restricting the functional measure to the first Gribov region Omega. Our simulations are done for lattice volumes up to 120^4 and for physical lattice extents up to 13.5 fm. We investigate the infinite-volume and continuum limits.
This is the first of a series of two papers on the perturbative computation of the ghost and gluon propagators in SU(3) Lattice Gauge Theory. Our final aim is to eventually compare with results from lattice simulations in order to enlight the genuinely non-perturbative content of the latter. By means of Numerical Stochastic Perturbation Theory we compute the ghost propagator in Landau gauge up to three loops. We present results in the infinite volume and $a to 0$ limits, based on a general strategy that we discuss in detail.