Chiral Symmetry Breaking with the Curtis-Pennington Vertex

TL;DR

This paper investigates chiral symmetry breaking in quenched QED4 using the Curtis-Pennington vertex Ansatz, identifying a critical coupling and comparing results with the ladder approximation.

Contribution

It introduces an analysis of chiral symmetry breaking with the Curtis-Pennington vertex, providing estimates of the critical coupling and showing qualitative agreement with previous ladder approximation results.

Findings

Existence of a critical coupling for chiral symmetry breaking

Minor numerical differences from the ladder approximation

Qualitative agreement with previous theoretical models

Abstract

We study chiral symmetry breaking in quenched QED$_4$, using a vertex Ansatz recently proposed by Curtis and Pennington. Bifurcation analysis is employed to establish the existence of a critical coupling and to estimate its value. The main results are in qualitative agreement with the ladder approximation, the numerical changes being minor.