Chiral symmetry in hadron physics methods and ideas of chiral symmetry

Methods and ideas of chiral symmetry is presented based on a lecture note to help the future researches in hadron dynamics along with the chiral symmetry. The chiral symmetry was originally developed as the symmetry between currents before the discovery of QCD. It has come to be understood in principle by now that the symmetry is spontaneously broken and only the part of flavor symmetry remains explicitly. In QCD, however, the chiral symmetry has come to be regarded as the base of the symmetry of the global flavor space of quarks. One of the recent topics of the lattice gauge theory is how the hadron properties will change when the broken symmetry is going to be restored. Since the chiral symmetry is global, it is different from gauge symmetry which is local. It explains the degeneracy of hadron masses and relations between the elements of S-matrix in which same number of particles are included. In practice, however, the symmetry of the axial part is spontaneously broken and pions which behave like gauge particles come to play. Chiral symmetry is defined as the (internal) flavor symmetry for the two independent chirality states of quarks. It discriminates two different fundamental quarks defined for the Lorentz groups O(4) - SL(2, C). The symmetry transformation itself is, however, different from the chirality. They should not be confused. In this lecture note, fundamental properties of pions are described on the basis of the interaction with nucleons at first. General properties of the chiral symmetry and some of the low energy theorems on current algebra are introduced. Then, linear sigma model and nonlinear sigma model are introduced. Then the Skyrme-model, which provides an idea as important as quarks, is explained. One of the interesting topics at present is to restore the broken axial symmetry experimentally to investigate the mechanism of symmetry breaking. (S. Funahashi)