Facets of confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking

Abstract.The gap equation is a cornerstone in understanding dynamical chiral symmetry breaking and may also provide clues to confinement. A symmetry-preserving truncation of its kernel enables proofs of important results and the development of an efficacious phenomenology. We describe a model of the kernel that yields: a momentum-dependent dressed-quark propagator in fair agreement with quenched lattice-QCD results; and chiral limit values, $f_\pi^0 = 68 $MeV and $\langle \bar q q \rangle = -(190 {\rm MeV})^3$. It is compared with models inferred from studies of the gauge sector.