Spontaneous mass generation and chiral symmetry breaking in a lattice Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model

TL;DR

This paper investigates a lattice Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model with staggered fermions, demonstrating spontaneous fermion mass generation and discrete chiral symmetry breaking at low temperatures in higher dimensions.

Contribution

It provides a rigorous proof of spontaneous mass generation and chiral symmetry breaking in a lattice NJL model using reflection positivity and infrared bounds.

Findings

Fermion mass is spontaneously generated at low temperatures in dimensions ≥3.

Discrete chiral symmetry is broken due to phase transition.

The results are valid in the strong coupling regime.

Abstract

We study a lattice Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model with interacting staggered fermions in the Kogut-Susskind Hamiltonian formalism. The model has a discrete chiral symmetry but not the usual continuous chiral symmetry. In a strong coupling regime for the four-fermion interaction, we prove that the mass of the fermions is spontaneously generated at sufficiently low non-zero temperatures in the dimensions $\nu \ge 3$ of the model and zero temperature in $\nu \ge 2$. Due to the phase transition, the discrete chiral symmetry of the model is broken. Our analysis is based on the reflection positivity for fermions and the method of the infrared bound.