Title:The mass gap and gluon confinement

Abstract: In our previous publication [1-3] it has been proven that the general iteration solution of the Shwinger-Dyson equation for the full gluon propagator (i.e., when the skeleton loop integrals, contributing into the gluon self-energy, have to be iterated, which means that no any truncations/approximations have been made) can be algebraically (i.e., exactly) decomposed as the sum of the two principally different terms. The first term is the Laurent expansion in integer powers of severe (i.e., more singular than $1/q^2$) infrared singularities accompanied by the corresponding powers of the mass gap and multiplied by the corresponding residues. The standard second term is always as much singular as $1/q^2$ and otherwise remaining undetermined. Here it is explicitly shown that the infrared renormalization of the mass gap only is needed to render theory free of all severe infrared singularities in the gluon sector. Moreover, this leads to the gluon confinement criterion in a gauge-invariant way. As a result of the infrared renormalization of the mass gap in the initial Laurent expansion, that is dimensionally regularized, the simplest severe infrared singularity $(q^2)^{-2}$ survives only. It is multiplied by the mass gap squared, which is the scale responsible for the large scale structure of the true QCD vacuum. The $\delta$-type regularization of the simplest severe infrared singularity (and its generalization for the multi-loop skeleton integrals) is provided by the dimensional regularization method correctly implemented into the theory of distributions. This makes it possible to formulate exactly and explicitly the full gluon propagator (up to its unimportant perturbative part).