Relating the quark and gluon condensates through the QCD vacuum energy - art. no. 054012

Using the Cornwall-Jackiw-Tomboulis effective potential for composite opera tors we compute the QCD vacuum energy as a function of the dynamical quark and gluon propagators, which are related to their respective condensates as predicted by the operator product expansion. The identification of this re sult to the vacuum energy obtained from the trace of the energy-momentum, t ensor allows us to study the gluon self-energy; verifying that it is fairly represented in the ultraviolet by the asymptotic behavior predicted by the operator product expansion, and in the infrared it is frozen at its asympt otic value at one scare of the order of the dynamical gluon mass. We also d iscuss the implications of this identity for heavy and light quarks. For he avy quarks we recover, through the vacuum energy calculation, the relation m(f)[<(psi)over bar>(f)psi(f)] similar to - 1/12(alpha(s)/pi)G(mu nu)G(mu n u) obtained many years ago with QCD sum rules.