The mass gap and solution of the gluon confinement problem in QCD

We propose to realize a mass gap in QCD not imposing the transversality condition on the full gluon self-energy, while preserving the color gauge invariance condition for the full gluon propagator. Since due to color confinement the gluon is not a physical state, none of physical observables/processes in low-energy QCD will be directly affected by such a temporary violation of color gauge invriance/symmetry. In order to make the existence of a mass gap perfectly clear the corresponding subtraction procedure is introduced. All this llows one to etablish the general structure of the full gluon propagator in the presence of a mass gap. It is mainly generated by the nonlinear interaction of massless gluon modes. The physical meaning of the mass gap is to be responsible for the large-scale (low-energy/momentum), i.e., nonperturbative structure of the true QCD vacuum. The direct nonlinear iteration solution of the transcendental equation for the full gluon propagator in the presence of a mass gap is present. We formulate a generl method how to restore the transversality of the full gluon propagator relevant for the nonperturbative QCD. It is explicitly shown that such a solution confines QCD. The exact and gauge-invariant criterion of gluon confinement is derived. The gauge-invariant quark confinement criterion is also formulated.