  We calculate a renormalized Hamiltonian for pure-glue QCD and diagonalize it.
The renormalization procedure is designed to produce a Hamiltonian that will
yield physical states that rapidly converge in an expansion in free-particle
Fock-space sectors. To make this possible, we use light-front field theory to
isolate vacuum effects, and we place a smooth cutoff on the Hamiltonian to
force its free-state matrix elements to quickly decrease as the difference of
the free masses of the states increases. The cutoff violates a number of
physical principles of light-front pure-glue QCD, including Lorentz covariance
and gauge covariance. This means that the operators in the Hamiltonian are not
required to respect these physical principles. However, by requiring the
Hamiltonian to produce cutoff-independent physical quantities and by requiring
it to respect the unviolated physical principles of pure-glue QCD, we are able
to derive recursion relations that define the Hamiltonian to all orders in
perturbation theory in terms of the running coupling. We approximate all
physical states as two-gluon states, and use our recursion relations to
calculate to second order the part of the Hamiltonian that is required to
compute the spectrum. We diagonalize the Hamiltonian using basis-function
expansions for the gluons' color, spin, and momentum degrees of freedom. We
examine the sensitivity of our results to the cutoff and use them to analyze
the nonperturbative scale dependence of the coupling. We investigate the effect
of the dynamical rotational symmetry of light-front field theory on the
rotational degeneracies of the spectrum and compare the spectrum to recent
lattice results. Finally, we examine our wave functions and analyze the various
sources of error in our calculation.
