Concerning the quark condensate

A continuum expression for the trace of the massive dressed-quark propagator is used to explicate a connection between the infrared limit of the QCD Dirac operator's spectrum and the quark condensate appearing in the operator product expansion. This connection is verified via comparison with a lattice-QCD simulation. The pseudoscalar vacuum polarization provides a good approximation to the condensate over a larger range of current-quark masses.