# Centre vortices are the seeds of dynamical chiral symmetry breaking

## TL;DR

This study uses lattice QCD to demonstrate that centre vortices are fundamental to dynamical chiral symmetry breaking and quark confinement, with vortex-only configurations capturing key features of the original gauge fields.

## Contribution

It reveals a direct link between centre vortices and chiral symmetry breaking, showing vortex-only backgrounds can reproduce essential nonperturbative phenomena.

## Key findings

- Vortex removal eliminates features of chiral symmetry breaking.
- Vortex-only configurations replicate key gauge field features after smoothing.
- Removal of vortices destroys confinement and chiral symmetry breaking signals.

## Abstract

Using lattice QCD, we reveal a fundamental connection between centre vortices and several key features associated with dynamical chiral symmetry breaking and quark confinement. Calculations are performed in pure SU(3) gauge theory using the chiral overlap fermion action. Starting from the original Monte Carlo gauge fields, a vortex identification procedure yields vortex-removed and vortex-only backgrounds. We examine the static quark potential, the quark mass function, the hadron spectrum, the local topological charge density, and the distribution of instanton-like objects on the original, vortex-removed and vortex-only ensembles. The removal of vortices consistently results in the removal of the corresponding feature associated with dynamical chiral symmetry breaking. Remarkably, we observe that after some smoothing, in each of these cases, the vortex-only degrees of freedom are able to encapsulate the pertinent features of the original gauge fields.