A novel strategy to prove chiral symmetry breaking in QCD-like theories

We demonstrate that chiral symmetry breaking occurs in the confining regime of QCD-like theories with N c colors and N f flavors. Our proof is based on a novel strategy, called ‘downlifting’, by which solutions of the 't Hooft anomaly matching and persistent mass conditions for a theory with N f − 1 flavors are constructed from those of a theory with N f flavors, while N c is fixed. By induction, chiral symmetry breaking is proven for any N f ≥ p m i n in the confining regime, where p m i n is the smallest prime factor of N c . The proof can be extended to N f < p m i n under the additional assumption on the absence of phase transitions when quark masses are sent to infinity. Our results do not rely on assumptions on the spectrum of massless bound states other than the fact that they are color-singlet hadrons.

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Publication Details

Journal
Physics Letters B
Published
2025-02-28
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2025.139367
Citations
5
Primary Topic
Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
9.35

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article

A novel strategy to prove chiral symmetry breaking in QCD-like theories

Roberto Contino, Luca Ciambriello, Andrea Luzio, Ling-Xiao Xu et al.
5 citations
Physics Letters B
Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions
9.35
article

A novel strategy to prove chiral symmetry breaking in QCD-like theories

Roberto Contino, Luca Ciambriello, Andrea Luzio, Ling-Xiao Xu, Marcello Romano
article en
5 citations

Abstract

We demonstrate that chiral symmetry breaking occurs in the confining regime of QCD-like theories with N c colors and N f flavors. Our proof is based on a novel strategy, called ‘downlifting’, by which solutions of the 't Hooft anomaly matching and persistent mass conditions for a theory with N f − 1 flavors are constructed from those of a theory with N f flavors, while N c is fixed. By induction, chiral symmetry breaking is proven for any N f ≥ p m i n in the confining regime, where p m i n is the smallest prime factor of N c . The proof can be extended to N f < p m i n under the additional assumption on the absence of phase transitions when quark masses are sent to infinity. Our results do not rely on assumptions on the spectrum of massless bound states other than the fact that they are color-singlet hadrons.

Physics Letters BVol. 862
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (IT), The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) (IT), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR), Scuola Normale Superiore (IT), Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (IT), Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives (FR), Université Paris-Saclay (FR), CEA Paris-Saclay (FR), Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Roma I (IT), Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Pisa (IT), Institut de Physique Théorique (FR), Sapienza University of Rome (IT)
National Science Foundation, Aspen Center for Physics, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca, Munich Institute for Astro- and Particle Physics
Openalex Percentile: Top 3%
Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions
9.35
DOIOpen Access PDFOpenAlex
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