Chiral symmetry restoration at finite temperature in a model with manifest confinement

Abstract

Multiple lattice evidences support the existence of a confining but chirally symmetric regime of QCD above the chiral symmetry restoration crossover at Tch≃155 MeV. This regime is characterised by an approximate chiral spin symmetry of the partition function, which is a symmetry of the colour charge and the confining electric part of the QCD Lagrangian. It is traditionally believed that confinement should automatically induce spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry, which would preclude the existence of a confining but chirally symmetric regime of QCD at high temperatures. We employ a well-known solvable quark model for QCD in 3+1 dimensions that is chirally symmetric and manifestly confining and argue that while confinement indeed induces dynamical breaking of chiral symmetry at T=0, a chiral restoration phase transition takes place at some critical temperature Tch. Above this temperature, the spectrum of the model consists of chirally symmetric hadrons with approximate chiral spin symmetry.

Keywords

• QCD phase diagram
• Confinement
• Chiral spin symmetry
• Chiral symmetry