Aspects of Hadron Physics

TL;DR

This paper reviews how Dyson-Schwinger equations are applied in hadron physics to address fundamental questions about confinement, chiral symmetry breaking, and mass generation in quantum chromodynamics.

Contribution

It provides an overview of recent progress and applications of Dyson-Schwinger equations in understanding hadron structure and related nonperturbative QCD phenomena.

Findings

Insights into the mechanism of confinement

Connections between confinement and chiral symmetry breaking

Explanation of the origin of most of the universe's mass

Abstract

Detailed investigations of the structure of hadrons are essential for understanding how matter is constructed from the quarks and gluons of Quantum chromodynamics (QCD), and amongst the questions posed to modern hadron physics, three stand out. What is the rigorous, quantitative mechanism responsible for confinement? What is the connection between confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking? And are these phenomena together sufficient to explain the origin of more than 98% of the mass of the observable universe? Such questions may only be answered using the full machinery of nonperturbative relativistic quantum field theory. This contribution provides a perspective on progress toward answering these key questions. In so doing it will provide an overview of the contemporary application of Dyson-Schwinger equations in Hadron Physics. The presentation assumes that the reader is familiar with the concepts and notation of relativistic quantum mechanics, with the functional integral formulation of quantum field theory and with regularisation and renormalisation in its perturbative formulation.