The variational approach to QCD in Coulomb gauge developed previously by the Tübingen group is improved by enlarging the space of the quark trial vacuum wave functionals through a new Dirac structure in the quark-gluon coupling. Our Ansatz for the quark vacuum wave functional ensures that all linear divergences cancel in the quark gap equation resulting from the minimization of the energy calculated to two-loop order. The logarithmic divergences are absorbed in a renormalized coupling which is adjusted to reproduce the phenomenological value of the quark condensate. We also unquench the gluon propagator and show that the unquenching effects are generally small and amount to a small reduction in the midmomentum regime.

• Received 22 December 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.93.065003