Further Investigation of Massive Landau-Gauge Propagators in the Infrared Limit

Understand

We investigate how the infrared behavior of electric and magnetic gluon propagators in Landau gauge is affected by temperature.

• More precisely, we perform large-lattice simulations in pure SU(2) gauge theory around the transition temperature Tc and study the longitudinal (electric) and transverse (magnetic) gluon propagators in momentum space, proposing the calculation of screening masses through an Ansatz from the zero-temperature case.
• Going from zero to nonzero temperature, we see that the longitudinal gluon propagator DL(p) is enhanced, with an apparent plateau value in the infrared, while the transverse propagator DT(p) gets progressively more infrared-suppressed, with a clear turnover in momentum at all nonzero temperatures considered.
• Our data allow us to associate what was previously seen as a peak in the infrared value of DL(p) at Tc to severe finite-size effects along the temperature direction.