The analytic structure of the QCD propagators, confinement, and deconfinement
High Energy Physics - Theory
2026-04-06 v1 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
Abstract
We present the first complete calculation of the analytic structure of the zero-spatial-momentum finite-temperature Landau-gauge gluon propagator carried out at one loop by a massive deformation of QCD perturbation theory -- the screened massive expansion -- at temperatures ranging from to . We find no signatures of deconfinement in the form of meaningful changes in said structure. We argue that, beyond Euclidean space, massive perturbative methods -- including the Curci-Ferrari model -- might be missing crucial dynamical information as a consequence of the perturbative violation of QCD's Ward identities.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.02963,
title = {The analytic structure of the QCD propagators, confinement, and deconfinement},
author = {Giorgio Comitini},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.02963},
year = {2026}
}