The question of the mass gap

Some years ago I proposed a set of solutions to the classical Yang-Mills equations displaying a massive behavior. For a massless theory this is somewhat unexpected. After a criticism by Terry Tao I had to admit that, for a generic gauge, such solutions are just asymptotic ones assuming the coupling runs to infinity (see here and here). Although my arguments on Yang-Mills theory were not changed by this, I have found such a conclusion somewhat unsatisfactory. The reason is that if you have classical solutions to Yang-Mills equations that display a mass gap, their quantization cannot change such a conclusion. Rather, one should eventually expect a superimposed quantum spectrum. But working with asymptotic classical solutions can make things somewhat involved. This forced me to choose the gauge to be always Lorenz because in such a case the solutions were exact. Besides, it is a great success for a physicist to find exact solutions to fundamental equations of physics as these yield an immediate idea of what is going on in a theory. Even in such case we would get a conclusive representation of the way the mass gap can form.

Finally, after some years of struggle, I was able to get such a set of exact solutions to the classical Yang-Mills theory displaying a mass gap (see here). Such solutions confirm both the Tao’s argument that an all equal component solution for Yang-Mills equations cannot hold in any gauge and also my original argument that an all equal component solution holds, in a general case, only asymptotically with the coupling running to infinity. But classically, there exist solutions displaying a mass gap that arises from the nonlinearity of the equations of motion. The mass gap goes to zero as the coupling does. Translating this in the quantum realm is straightforward as I showed for the Lorenz (Landau) gauge. I hope all this will help to better elucidate all the physics around strong interactions. My efforts since 2005 went in that direction and are still going on.

Marco Frasca (2009). Mapping a Massless Scalar Field Theory on a Yang-Mills Theory: Classical Case Mod. Phys. Lett. A 24, 2425-2432 (2009) arXiv: 0903.2357v4

Marco Frasca (2014). Exact solutions for classical Yang-Mills fields arXiv arXiv: 1409.2351v1