Transversality of the resummed thermal gluon self-energy

Abstract

The perturbative Ward identities obeyed by the effective vertices and propagators for thermal quantum chromodynamics (QCD) have recently been used to prove to order g2T the on-shell transversality of the imaginary part of the (resummed) gluon self-energy in all linear gauges. Here the same result is derived for both the real and imaginary parts of the self-energy using the nonperturbative gauge-fixing identities obeyed by the generating functional for QCD.