https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-024-12970-9
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Four-gluon vertex in collinear kinematics
1
University of Campinas-UNICAMP, Institute of Physics Gleb Wataghin, 13083-859, Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil
2
Department of Theoretical Physics and IFIC, University of Valencia and CSIC, 46100, Valencia, Spain
Received:
29
February
2024
Accepted:
30
May
2024
Published online:
8
July
2024
To date, the four-gluon vertex is the least explored component of the QCD Lagrangian, mainly due to the vast proliferation of Lorentz and color structures required for its description. In this work we present a nonperturbative study of this vertex, based on the one-loop dressed Schwinger–Dyson equation obtained from the 4PI effective action. A vast simplification is brought about by resorting to “collinear” kinematics, where all momenta are parallel to each other, and by appealing to the charge conjugation symmetry in order to eliminate certain color structures. Out of the fifteen form factors that comprise the transversely-projected version of this vertex, two are singled out and studied in detail; the one associated with the classical tensorial structure is moderately suppressed in the infrared regime, while the other diverges logarithmically at the origin. Quite interestingly, both form factors display the property known as “planar degeneracy” at a rather high level of accuracy. With these results we construct an effective charge that quantifies the strength of the four-gluon interaction, and compare it with other vertex-derived charges from the gauge sector of QCD.
© The Author(s) 2024
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