Publisher Description

The structure of light hadrons is dominated by the spontaneously broken chiral symmetry of the strongly interacting (QCD) vacuum. Low energy properties of light hadrons can be described in terms of quarks interacting with chiral fields. This book gives a comprehensive account of a large class of models which describe the restoration of chiral symmetry at high temperature and density, the effective interactions between quarks, mesons as solutions of theBeth-Salpeter equation, and baryons in terms of solitons which rotate in flavor space. An in-depth analysis of regularization is given, including regularization by delocalized fields. Symmetry conservingapproximations are formulated using both path integral and Feynmann graph methods. The style is pedagogical and well suited to graduate and PhD students who want to learn the techniques used in present day research. It can also serve as a reference for research and lecture courses.

Author Biography

Georges Ripka is at Centre d'Etudes de Saclay.

Table of Contents

Introduction1: Quark bilinear operators2: Effective quark interactions3: The NambuJona-Lasinio model4: The equivalent linear sigma model5: Regularization6: Correlation functions: basic properties7: Symmetry conserving approximations8: Correlation functions in the NambuJona-Lasinio model9: Overview of results in the meson sector10: Further chiral quark models11: Chiral Solitons12: Rotations of solitons in flavor spaceA. SU(N) matrices, Dirac matrices, Fierz transformationsB. The SU(N) rotorC. BosonizationReferences

Long Description

The structure of light hadrons is dominated by the spontaneously broken chiral symmetry of the strongly interacting (QCD) vacuum. Low energy properties of light hadrons can be described in terms of quarks interacting with chiral fields. This book gives a comprehensive account of a large class of models which describe the restoration of chiral symmetry at high temperature and density, the effective interactions between quarks, mesons as solutions of the
Beth-Salpeter equation, and baryons in terms of solitons which rotate in flavor space. An in-depth analysis of regularization is given, including regularization by delocalized fields. Symmetry conserving
approximations are formulated using both path integral and Feynmann graph methods. The style is pedagogical and well suited to graduate and PhD students who want to learn the techniques used in present day research. It can also serve as a reference for research and lecture courses.

Feature

BL Comprehensive description, comparison and assessment of a large class of hadron models.
BL Clear and easily accessible exposition of the theory.
BL An in-depth analysis of regularization procedures.
BL Both path integral and Feynmann graph formulations of the theory are given.

Details