Centre vortices are the seeds of dynamical chiral symmetry breaking

Understand

Using lattice QCD, we reveal a fundamental connection between centre vortices and several key features associated with dynamical chiral symmetry breaking and quark confinement.

• Calculations are performed in pure SU(3) gauge theory using the chiral overlap fermion action.
• Starting from the original Monte Carlo gauge fields, a vortex identification procedure yields vortex-removed and vortex-only backgrounds.
• We examine the static quark potential, the quark mass function, the hadron spectrum, the local topological charge density, and the distribution of instanton-like objects on the original, vortex-removed and vortex-only ensembles.