PHYSICAL SPECTRUM FROM CONFINED EXCITATIONS IN A YANG–MILLS-INSPIRED TOY MODEL

Abstract

We study a toy model for an interacting scalar field theory in which the fundamental excitations are confined in the sense of having unphysical, positivity-violating propagators, a fact tracing back to a decomposition of these in propagators with complex conjugate mass poles (the so-called i-particles). Similar two-point functions show up in certain approaches to gluon or quark propagators in Yang–Mills gauge theories. We investigate the spectrum of our model and show that suitable composite operators may be constructed having a well-defined Källén–Lehmann spectral representation, thus allowing for a particle interpretation. These physical excitations would correspond to the "mesons" of the model, the latter being bound states of two unphysical i-particles. The meson mass is explicitly estimated from the pole emerging in a resummed class of diagrams. The main purpose of this paper is thus to explicitly verify how a real mass pole can and does emerge out of constituent i-particles that have complex masses.