Chiral symmetry breaking and the Lorentz nature of confinement

TL;DR

This paper investigates how spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in QCD transforms the fundamental vector-like gluon interaction into an effective scalar interaction, leading to the formation of the QCD string.

Contribution

It demonstrates that chiral symmetry breaking induces a scalar component in the interquark potential, explaining the Lorentz nature of confinement in QCD.

Findings

Chiral symmetry breaking generates a scalar interaction component.

The scalar interaction is responsible for QCD string formation.

Explicit analysis for heavy-light quarkonium confirms the mechanism.

Abstract

We address the question of the Lorentz nature of the effective interquark interaction in QCD which leads to the formation of the QCD string between colour charges. In particular, we start from a manifestly vectorial fundamental interaction mediated by gluons and demonstrate that, as soon as chiral symmetry is broken spontaneously, the effective interquark interaction acquires a selfconsistently generated scalar part which is eventually responsible for the formation of the QCD string. We demonstrate this explicitly for a heavy-light quarkonium, using the approach of the Schwinger-Dyson-type equation and the quantum-mechanical Hamiltonian method of the QCD string with quarks at the ends.