Phase structure and confinement properties of noncompact gauge theories I

In the context of reviewing noncompact lattice gauge models at zero and finite temperature we study in detail a contribution of the invariant measure and the time-like plaquette configurations to correlation functions, analyze the problem of the compactness of the potentials in respect to the confinement and indicate the essential features to deal with the Wilson gauge theory in the weak coupling region. A method for calculating an effective confining noncompact model is also proposed.