No Arabic abstract
On a null-plane (light-front), all effects of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking are contained in the three Hamiltonians (dynamical Poincare generators), while the vacuum state is a chiral invariant. This property is used to give a general proof of Goldstones theorem on a null-plane. Focusing on null-plane QCD with N degenerate flavors of light quarks, the chiral-symmetry breaking Hamiltonians are obtained, and the role of vacuum condensates is clarified. In particular, the null-plane Gell-Mann-Oakes-Renner formula is derived, and a general prescription is given for mapping all chiral-symmetry breaking QCD condensates to chiral-symmetry conserving null-plane QCD condensates. The utility of the null-plane description lies in the operator algebra that mixes the null-plane Hamiltonians and the chiral symmetry charges. It is demonstrated that in a certain non-trivial limit, the null-plane operator algebra reduces to the symmetry group SU(2N) of the constituent quark model.
We start with the relation between the chiral symmetry breaking and gauge field topology. New lattice result further enhance the notion of Zero Mode Zone, a very narrow strip of states with quasizero Dirac eigenvalues. Then we move to the issue of origin of mass and Brown-RHo scaling: a number of empirical facts contradicts to the idea that masses of quarks and such hadrons as $rho,N$ decrease near $T_c$. We argue that while at $T=0$ the main contribution to the effective quark mass is chirally odd $m_{snchi}$, near $T_c$ it rotates to chirally-even component $m_chi$, because infinite clusters of topological solitons gets split into finite ones. Recent progress in understanding of topology require introduction of nonzero holonomy $<A_0> eq 0$, which splits instantons into $N_c$ (anti)selfdual instanton-dyons. Qualitative progress, as well as first numerical studios of the dyon ensemble are reported. New connections between chiral symmetry breaking and confinement are recently understood, since instanton-dyons generates holonomy potential with a minimum at confining value, if the ensemble is dense enough.
We present a model for describing nuclear matter at finite density based on quarks interacting with chiral fields, sigma and pi and with vector mesons introduced as massive gauge fields. The chiral Lagrangian includes a logarithmic potential, associated with the breaking of scale invariance. We provide results for the soliton in vacuum and at finite density, using the Wigner-Seitz approximation. We show that the model can reach higher densities respect to the linear-sigma model and that the introduction of vector mesons allows to obtain saturation. This result was never obtained before in similar approaches.
Soft-pion theorems are used to show how chiral symmetry constrains the contributions of low-momentum pions to the quark condensate, the pion decay constant and hadron masses, all of which have been proposed as signals of partial restoration of chiral symmetry in matter. These have contributions of order T^2 for a pion gas or of order m_pi for cold nuclear matter, which have different coefficients in all three cases, showing that there are no simple relations between the changes to these quantities in matter. In particular, such contributions are absent from the masses of vector mesons and nucleons and so these masses cannot scale as any simple function of the quark condensate. More generally, pieces of the quark condensate that arise from low-momentum pions should not be associated with partial restoration of chiral symmetry.
The isovector--vector and the isovector--axial-vector current are related by a chiral transformation. These currents can be called chiral partners at the fundamental level. In a world where chiral symmetry was not broken, the corresponding current-current correlators would show the same spectral information. In the real world chiral symmetry is spontaneously broken. A prominent peak -- the rho-meson -- shows up in the vector spectrum (measured in (e^+ e^-)-collisions and tau-decays). On the other hand, in the axial-vector spectrum a broad bump appears -- the a_1-meson (also accessible in tau-decays). It is tempting to call rho and a_1 chiral partners at the hadronic level. Strong indications are brought forward that these ``chiral partners do not only differ in mass but even in their nature: The rho-meson appears dominantly as a quark-antiquark state with small modifications from an attractive pion-pion interaction. The a_1-meson, on the other hand, can be understood as a meson-molecule state mainly formed by the attractive interaction between pion and rho-meson. A key issue here is that the meson-meson interactions are fixed by chiral symmetry breaking. It is demonstrated that one can understand the vector and the axial-vector spectrum very well within this interpretation. It is also shown that the opposite cases, namely rho as a pion-pion molecule or a_1 as a quark-antiquark state lead to less satisfying results. Finally speculations on possible in-medium changes of hadron properties are presented.
The spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry is examined by chiral effective theories, such as the linear sigma model and the Nambu Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model. Indicating that sufficiently large contribution of the UA(1) anomaly can break chiral symmetry spontaneously, we discuss such anomaly driven symmetry breaking and its implication. We derive a mass relation among the SU(3) flavor singlet mesons, eta0 and sigma0, in the linear sigma model to be satisfied for the anomaly driven symmetry breaking in the chiral limit, and find that it is also supported in the NJL model. With the explicit breaking of chiral symmetry, we find that the chiral effective models reproducing the observed physical quantities suggest that the sigma0 meson regarded as the quantum fluctuation of the chiral condensate should have a mass smaller than an order of 800 MeV when the anomaly driven symmetry breaking takes place.