Phenomenology of dynamical symmetry breaking in QCD

A consistent treatment of the QCD quark propagator and quark-antiquark bound state equations is presented which follows the Nambu and Jona-Lasinio approach to the discussion of chiral symmetry breaking. An expression is obtained for the dynamical, momentum dependent, mass. In the approximation used here the dynamical mass is determined byM ₀, its value at zero momentum, and by the strong coupling constant α _s and bare quark massm ₀. In the limiting case of no explicit chiral symmetry breaking. i.e.,m ₀=0, this expression coincides in form with the one obtained by Chang and Chang in their renormalization-group analysis. In this limit chiral symmetry remains broken and we show the explicit appearance of a Nambu-Goldstone pion. A consistent calculation of the pseudoscalar, scalar and vector meson masses gives values ofm ₀, α _s andM ₀ well in step with other estimates. This makes possible a calculation off _π, the pion decay constant, in reasonable agreement with experiment.