Chiral symmetry breaking

My dissertation describes attempts to understand the mechanism of chiral symmetry breaking (CSB) in the strong interactions. The approach taken is an analytic one, based on two different models. I start by discussing a model constructed in Coulomb gauge QCD. The model describes the formation of quark-antiquark condensates through an effective gluon potential. I show that the model predicts that confining potentials will induce CSB whereas non-confining potentials will not. I then introduce temperature effects to show that the chiral symmetry restoring and deconfining transitions occur together. I conclude this section by describing how to incorporate retardation effects into the potential. I then analyse the fermionic CPN model at finite temperatures and densities. There is a simultaneous chiral and deconfining transition for a critical temperature or density. I use the low energy behaviour of this model to construct a low energy effective lagrangian for QCD at finite temperatures and densities, from which I recover the prediction that CSB is due to confinement. (author)