Confinement and mass gap in abelian gauge

First, we present a simple confining abelian pure gauge theory. Classically, its kinetic term is not positive definite, and it contains a simple UV regularized F⁴ interaction. This provokes the formation of a condensate such that, at the saddle point of the effective potential, the wave function normalization constant of the abelian gauge fields vanishes exactly. Then we study SU(2) pure Yang-Mills theory in an abelian gauge and introduce an auxiliary field for a BRST invariant condensate of dimension 2, which renders the charged sector massive. Under simple assumptions its effective low energy theory reduces to the confining abelian model discussed before, and the VEV of is seen to scale correctly with the renormalization point. Under these assumptions, the confinement condition Z _eff = 0 also holds for the massive charged sector, which suppresses the couplings of the charged fields to the abelian gauge bosons in the infrared regime. Received: 27 November 2002 / Published online: 14 April 2003 RID="a" ID="a" e-mail: Ulrich.Ellwanger@th.u-psud.fr RID="b" ID="b" e-mail: Nicolas.Wschebor@th.u-psud.fr ^* Unité Mixte de Recherche - CNRS - UMR 8627