Gluon condensate and the vacuum structure of QCD

Phenomenological evidence and analytic approximations to the QCD ground state suggest a complex gluon condensate structure. Exclusion of elementary fermion excitations by the generation of infinite mass corrections is a consequence. In addition the existence of vacuum condensates in unbroken non-abelian gauge theories, endows SU(3) and higher order groups with a non-trivial structure in the manifold of possible vacuum solutions, which is not present in SU(2). This may be related to the existence of particle generations.