Schwinger displacement of the quark-gluon vertex

The action of the Schwinger mechanism in pure Yang-Mills theories endows gluons with an effective mass, and, at the same time, induces a measurable displacement to the Ward identity satisfied by the three-gluon vertex. In the present work we turn to Quantum Chromodynamics with two light quark flavors, and explore the appearance of this characteristic displacement at the level of the quark-gluon vertex. When the Schwinger mechanism is activated, this vertex acquires massless poles, whose momentum-dependent residues are determined by a set of coupled integral equations. The main effect of these residues is to displace the Ward identity obeyed by the pole-free part of the vertex, causing modifications to its form factors, and especially the one associated with the tree-level tensor. The comparison between the available lattice data for this form factor and the Ward identity prediction reveals a marked deviation, which is completely compatible with the theoretical expectation for the attendant residue. This analysis corroborates further the self-consistency of this mass-generating scenario in the general context of real-world strong interactions.