Instability of the chiral invariant vacuum due to gluon exchange

It has been shown by Finger, Horn and Mandula in the Tamm-Dancoff approximation that Coulomb exchange induces vacuum instability for α _s bigger than some critical value. We show here in all generality that the critical coupling is lower using the Bogolioubov-Valatin variational method. For Coulomb exchange we find \(\tfrac{4}{3}\alpha _s^{crit} = 1\) instead of \(\tfrac{4}{3}\alpha _s^{crit} = \tfrac{3}{2}\) , and adding transverse gluon exchange with the Breit interaction, \(\tfrac{4}{3}\alpha _s^{crit} = \tfrac{1}{3}\) . It is remarkable that these values of α _s ^crit are not far from the range of perturbative QCD.