Chiral Symmetry and Quark Confinement

In the physical vacuum of QCD, the energy density of lightquark 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 chiral symmetry, confines quarks, and makes gluons massive. February 1, 2008 ∗[email protected] http://kevin.phys.unm.edu/̃ kevin/ 1 The QCD Vacuum The thesis of this note is that chiral-symmetry breaking, quark confinement, and the short range of the strong force all arise from the same feature of QCD, namely that the energy density of strongly coupled light [1] quarks can be negative. The hamiltonian Hq of the u, d, and s quarks Hq = ∑