SU(3) center vortices underpin confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking

Abstract

The mass function of the nonperturbative quark propagator in SU(3) gauge theory shows only a weak dependence on the vortex content of the gauge configurations. Of particular note is the survival of dynamical mass generation on vortex-free configurations having a vanishing string tension. This admits the possibility that mass generation associated with dynamical chiral symmetry breaking persists without confinement. In this paper we examine the low-lying ground state hadron spectrum of the π, ρ, N and Δ and discover that while dynamical mass generation persists in the vortex-free theory, it is not connected to dynamical chiral symmetry breaking. In this way, center vortices in SU(3) gauge theory are intimately linked to both confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking.