The infrared behavior of lattice QCD Green's functions. A numerical study of lattice QCD in Landau gauge

Within the framework of lattice QCD we investigate different aspects of QCD in Landau gauge using Monte Carlo simulations. In particular, we focus on the low momentum behavior of gluon and ghost propagators. The gauge group is SU(3). Different systematic effects on the gluon and ghost propagators are studied. We demonstrate the ghost dressing function to systematically depend on the choice of Gribov copies at low momentum, while the influence on the gluon dressing function is not resolvable. Also the eigenvalue distribution of the Faddeev-Popov operator is sensitive to Gribov copies. We show that the influence of dynamical Wilson fermions on the ghost propagator is negligible at the momenta available to us. On the contrary, fermions affect the gluon propagator at large and intermediate momenta. In addition, we analyze data for both propagators obtained on asymmetric lattices and compare these results with data obtained on symmetric lattices. We compare our data with results from studies of Dyson-Schwinger equations for the gluon and ghost propagators. We demonstrate that the infrared behavior of both propagators, as found in this thesis, is consistent with different criteria for confinement. However, the running coupling constant, given as a renormalization-group-invariant combination of the gluon and ghost dressing functions, does not expose a finite infrared fixed point. Rather the data are in favor of an infrared vanishing coupling constant. We also report on a first nonperturbative computation of the SU(3) ghost-gluon-vertex renormalization constant. We present results of an investigation of the spectral properties of the Faddeev-Popov operator. For this we have calculated the low-lying eigenvalues and eigenmodes of the Faddeev-Popov operator. (orig.)