Soft Perturbative QCD

There are indications of a faith transition in QCD: The strong coupling may freeze at a sufficiently low value to make PQCD relevant even in the confining regime. The properties of PQCD at low Q^2 depend on the asymptotic field configuration assumed at t=\pm\infty. A change in the i\epsilon prescription of the free propagators is equivalent to including quarks and gluons in the initial and final states. Perturbative expansions thus generated are formally as justified as standard PQCD and may turn out to be phenomenologically relevant. I discuss examples of the effects of such propagator modifications in QED and QCD.