A tachyonic gluon mass: between infrared and ultraviolet

The gluon spin coupling to a Gaussian correlated background gauge field induces an effective tachyonic gluon mass. It is momentum dependent and vanishes in the UV only like 1/p2. In the IR, we obtain stabilization through a positive m2conf(p2) related to confinement. Recently a purely phenomenological tachyonic gluon mass was used to explain the linear rise in the qq̄ static potential at small distances and also some long standing discrepancies found in QCD sum rules. We show that the stochastic vacuum model of QCD predicts a gluon mass with the desired properties.