Heraclitus
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tom.stoer said:It depends what you call gluons.
If you restrict this term to massless plane wave states of the gluon field, then I agree. But if you construct the QCD Hilbert space of physical states as the Fock space restricted by the Gauss law constraint in order to ensure gauge invariance, then you can construct color singulet "gluonic" operators on this space; you have a generic description of what "gluons" are, namely states in this physical subspace created ny gluonic operators. Of course the plane wave states are no longer part of this physical subspace as they violate the Gauss law.
So when I am talking about gluons I do not restrict them to plane waves (as seen in deep inelastic scattering = in the limit of asymptotoc freedom) but I mean the full, non-perturbative gluon field in QCD.
I agree with your non-perturbative definition. Now, I have to suppose that some dependence on the coupling is in these states. You should recover ordinary plane wave description when the coupling goes to zero. The states you get when the coupling goes to infinity are massive. This I mean by a gluon getting a mass. Classically you can see this in the following way. Let us consider the massless scalar field with equation
\partial^2\phi+\lambda\phi^3=0.
This has an exact solution
\phi(x)=\mu\left(\frac{2}{\lambda}\right)^\frac{1}{4}{\rm sn}(p\cdot x+\theta,i)
being sn a Jacobi elliptic function, \mu and \theta two integration constants. This holds provided the following dispersion relation holds
p^2=\mu^2\left(\frac{\lambda}{2}\right)^\frac{1}{2}
and so this massless field, due to the presence of a finite self-interaction, gives a massive solution. When you take the limit of the coupling going to zero you recover the ordinary perturbed massless field. Classically, you observe a similar situation for the Yang-Mills field provided the gauge coupling is taken to go to infinity.