Ghost Hunting in the Yang-Mills Vacuum

Abstract

In this work, I analyze the zero modes of a one-loop semiclassical Yang-Mills theory in \(3+1\)d. I find that zero modes are generated by gauge redundancy of the background field. Proper gauge fixing, achieved by introducing a bosonic ghost term, together with zeta-function regularization, yields a finite one-loop effective action in closed form that reproduces the well-known one-loop Yang-Mills beta function.