Quark-gluon vertex: A perturbation theory primer and beyond

There has been growing evidence that the infrared enhancement of the form factors defining the full quark-gluon vertex plays an important role in realizing a dynamical breakdown of chiral symmetry in quantum chromodynamics, leading to the observed spectrum and properties of hadrons. Both the lattice and the Schwinger-Dyson communities have begun to calculate these form factors in various kinematical regimes of momenta involved. A natural consistency check for these studies is that they should match onto the perturbative predictions in the ultraviolet, where nonperturbative effects mellow down. In this article, we carry out a numerical analysis of the one-loop result for all the form factors of the quark-gluon vertex. Interestingly, even the one-loop results qualitatively encode most of the infrared enhancement features expected of their nonperturbative counter parts. We analyze various kinematical configurations of momenta: symmetric, on shell, and asymptotic. The on-shell limit enables us to compute anomalous chromomagnetic moment of quarks. The asymptotic results have implications for the multiplicative renormalizability of the quark propagator and its connection with the Landau-Khalatnikov-Fradkin transformations, allowing us to analyze and compare various Ansätze proposed so far.