Consistency of Lorentz-violating Yang-Mills theories: Gauge invariance and nonperturbative effects

Previous investigations on the renormalizability properties of Lorentz-violating Yang-Mills (LVYM) theories in the Landau gauge have pointed out the necessity of the inclusion of a masslike term for the gauge fields. If one aims at generalizing the theory to a more complicated gauge, such a masslike term can bring severe issues regarding gauge dependence of correlation functions of observables. We propose a Lorentz-violating Yang-Mills theory supplemented by a gauge-invariant mass term which generalizes the model in the Landau gauge. We discuss the foundational aspects of the model and highlight how it simplifies in the Landau gauge. Following the recent literature in pure Yang-Mills theories, we remark how the proposed massive extension of LVYM theories can be used as an effective model to access infrared properties within perturbation theory. Finally, we present a Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin-invariant formulation of the so-called refined Gribov-Zwanziger action in the presence of Lorentz-violating terms in linear covariant gauges and the underlying tree-level gauge-field propagator which is enriched by the nonperturbative information carried by the elimination of Gribov copies. Published by the American Physical Society 2024