Related papers: Chiral gap effect in curved space
We discuss an interesting possibility of nontrivial, quark-mass induced chiral vacuum alignment in color-flavor locking phase of cold, dense QCD. With the simplifying assumption that the gaps for quarks are identical to those of antiquarks…
In this paper we discuss the possibility that chiral phase transitions, analogous to those of QCD, occur in the vicinity of a black hole. If the black hole is surrounded by a gas of strongly interacting particles, an inhomogeneous…
Thermal pion fluctuations, in principle, can completely disorder the phase of the quark condensate and thus restore chiral symmetry. If this happens before the quark condensate melts, strongly-interacting matter will be in the pseudogap…
Dynamical chiral symmetry breaking is a nonperturbative phenomenon that may be studied using QCD's gap equation. Model-independent results can be obtained with a nonperturbative and symmetry preserving truncation. The gap equation yields…
In the physical vacuum of QCD, the energy density of light-quark fields strongly coupled to slowly varying gluon fields can be negative, and so a condensate of pairs of quarks and antiquarks of nearly opposite momenta forms which breaks…
In this talk, which popularizes some of our recent work, we provide novel insights into the bulk properties of light chiral quarks in a fixed Euclidean volume (e.g. lattice QCD). We show that the spontaneous breakdown of chiral symmetry…
We examine a toy model and a cascade effect for confinement and chiral symmetry breaking which consists in several phase transitions corresponding to the formation of bound states and chiral condensates with different number of fermions for…
The vacuum of Quantum Chromodynamics is a superposition of degenerate states with different topological numbers that are connected by tunneling (the $\theta$-vacuum). The tunneling events are due to topologically non-trivial configurations…
The chiral condensate, which is constant in vacuum, may become spatially modulated at moderately high densities where in the traditional picture of the QCD phase diagram a first-order chiral phase transition occurs. We review the current…
Quarks in strong magnetic fields (|eB|>>Lambda_QCD^2 ~ 0.04 GeV^2) acquire enhanced infrared phase space proportional to |eB|. Accordingly they provide larger chiral condensates and stronger backreactions to the gluon dynamics. Confronting…
I explain the concept that light quarks diffuse in the QCD vacuum following the spontaneous breakdown of chiral symmetry. I exploit the striking analogy to disordered electrons in metals, identifying, among others, the universal regime…
We use a variational procedure to study finite density QCD in an approximation in which the interaction between quarks is modelled by that induced by instantons. We find that uniform states with conventional chiral symmetry breaking have…
It is shown that the chiral symmetry is spontaneously broken by a constant magnetic field in QED. The dynamical mass of fermions (energy gap in the fermion spectrum) is $m_{dyn}\simeq C\sqrt{eB}\exp\left[-\left(\pi/\alpha\right)…
Vacuum of Quantum Chromodynamics in very strong (hadron-scale) magnetic fields exhibits many interesting nonperturbative effects. Some of these effects can be studied with the help of lattice simulations in quenched QCD. We review our…
We study in detail the effect of the finite current quark mass on chiral symmetry breaking, in the framework of truncated Coulomb gauge QCD with a linear confining quark-antiquark potential. In the chiral limit of massless current quarks,…
The chiral phase transition in QCD at finite chemical potential and temperature can be characterized for small chemical potential by its curvature and the transition temperature. The curvature is accessible to QCD lattice simulations, which…
The effect of vacuum birefringence is one of the first predictions of quantum electrodynamics (QED): the presence of a charged Dirac field makes the vacuum birefringent when threaded by magnetic fields. This effect, extremely weak for…
Several model calculations of the QCD phase structure at nonzero temperature and density suggest that in certain regions of the phase diagram inhomogeneous condensates are favored over homogeneous ones. In particular, in a two-flavor NJL…
We perform an explicit calculation of the axial current at finite rotation and temperature in curved space. We find that finite curvature and mass corrections to the chiral vortical effect satisfy a relation of the chiral gap effect, that…
Precise measurement of the $\pi\pi$-phase shift $\delta^0_0(E)$ at very low energies would provide, for the first time, the experimental evidence in favour of or against the existence of a large quark condensate in the QCD vacuum, which is…