Gluon propagator and quark confinement

The gluon propagator is investigated in Landau and in maximal center gauge for the gauge group SU(2) by means of lattice gauge simulations. We find that Gribov ambiguities arising from the implementation of Landau gauge have a small influence on the propagator. In agreement with previous findings, we obtain that the small momentum behavior is dominated by a mass, which is of order (1.48 +/- 0.05) rootsigma, where sigma is the string tension. By removing the confining vortices from the full Yang-Mills ensemble, we convert full YM-theory into a theory which does not confine quarks. We find that in the latter case the strength of the gluon propagator in the intermediate momentum range is strongly reduced. The spectral functions which reproduce the numerical data for the propagators are analyzed using a generalized Maximum Entropy Method. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.