A tachyonic gluon mass: between infrared and ultraviolet

The gluon spin coupling to a Gaussian correlated background gauge field ind uces an effective tachyonic gluon mass. It is momentum dependent and vanish es in the UV only like 1/p(2). In the IR, we obtain stabilization through a positive m(conf)(2)(p(2)) related to confinement. Recently a purely phenom enological tachyonic gluon mass was used to explain the linear rise in the q (q) over bar static potential at small distances and also some long stand ing discrepancies found in QCD sum rules. We show that the stochastic vacuu m model of QCD predicts a gluon mass with the desired properties. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.