Wilson Loop and the Treatment of Axial Gauge Poles

We consider the question of gauge invariance of the Wilson loop in the light of a new treatment of axial gauge propagator proposed recently based on a finite field-dependent BRS (FFBRS) transformation. We remark that as under the FFBRS transformation the vacuum expectation value of a gauge invariant observable remains unchanged, our prescription automatically satisfies the Wilson loop criterion. Further, we give an argument for direct verification of the invariance of Wilson loop to O(g4) using the earlier work by Cheng and Tsai. We also note that our prescription preserves the thermal Wilson loop to O(g2). The axial-type gauges have found favor in many Standard Model calculations on account of their formal ghost-free nature. Associated, however, with the axial gauges, are the problems posed by the spurious 1/(η · q)-type e-mail:[email protected] e-mail:[email protected]