Narrow Results

The one-loop effective energy density of a pure SU(2) Yang–Mills theory in the Savvidy background is reconsidered. The stable and the unstable modes are identified. The stable modes are treated in the quadratic approximation. For the unstable modes, the full expansion including the cubic and the quartic terms in the fluctuations is used. The functional integral for the unstable modes is evaluated and added to the result for the stable modes. The resulting energy density coincides with the real part in the quadratic approximation of earlier studies and there is now no imaginary part.

We propose a novel type of color magnetic condensation originating from magnetic monopoles so that it provides the mass of off-diagonal gluons in the Yang-Mills theory. This dynamical mass generation enables us to explain the infrared Abelian dominance and monopole dominance by way of a non-Abelian Stokes theorem, which supports the dual superconductivity picture of quark confinement. Moreover, we show that the instability of Savvidy vacuum disappears by sufficiently large color magnetic condensation.