One-loop off-shell quark-gluon vertex in arbitrary gauge and dimensions: A streamlined approach through the second-order formalism of QCD

Abstract

The standard Feynman rules used for perturbative calculations in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) are derived from a Lagrangian that is first-order in derivatives. It includes a three-point quark-gluon vertex which obscures the precise disentangled manner in which spin and momentum are interchanged during these interactions. An unambiguous understanding of this interchange is insightful for efficiently extracting physically relevant information from various Green’s functions. To separate the scalar and spin degrees of freedom and gain physical insight from the outset, we examine the quark-gluon vertex using the less commonly employed second-order formalism of QCD. We compute this off-shell vertex in arbitrary space-time dimensions and covariant gauges by using scalar integrals with shifted dimensions, which include higher powers of the propagators, within a combined first- and second-order formalism. This approach naturally identifies the transverse components of the quark-gluon vertex, even before evaluating the tensor Feynman integrals. Our results are in complete agreement with those obtained from the first-order formalism. We also compute the on-shell version of this vertex using exclusively the second-order formalism, facilitating a precise identification of spin and momentum interchange. Through analyzing the Pauli form factor at k2=0 (where k represents the momentum of the external gluon), we find that only a specific set of second-order Feynman diagrams are relevant for calculating the electromagnetic and chromomagnetic dipole moments. These diagrams represent quantum processes in which the spin of the incoming quark changes only once due to interactions with the virtual gluons that form the quark-gluon vertex. All other interactions involve only momentum interchange (scalar interactions). Furthermore, we confirm existing results in the literature, which suggest that defining the chromomagnetic dipole moment in the limit k2→0 leads to infrared divergences. Published by the American Physical Society 2025