We establish that QED3 can possess a critical number of flavours, N_f^c, associated with dynamical chiral symmetry breaking if, and only if, the fermion wave function renormalisation and photon vacuum polarisation are homogeneous functions at infrared momenta when the fermion mass function vanishes. The Ward identity entails that the fermion-photon vertex possesses the same property and ensures a simple relationship between the homogeneity degrees of each of these functions. Simple models for the photon vacuum polarisation and fermion-photon vertex are used to illustrate these observations. The existence and value of N_f^c are contingent upon the precise form of the vertex but any discussion of gauge dependence is moot. We introduce an order parameter for confinement. Chiral symmetry restoration and deconfinement are coincident owing to an abrupt change in the analytic properties of the fermion propagator when a nonzero scalar self-energy becomes insupportable.
A key question to QCD is what mechanism generates the hadron mass in the light quark sector, where both confinement and chiral symmetry breaking are in the game. Are confinement and chiral symmetry breaking in the vacuum uniquely interconnected? Can hadrons survive chiral symmetry restoration? If yes, what happens with their mass and what symmetries beyond the chiral symmetry are there? We review our recent insights. In particular, in a dynamical lattice simulation we artificially restore chiral symmetry by removing the low-lying Dirac modes of the valence quark propagators, which is a well de…
Chiral dynamics is investigated using the chiral confining Lagrangian (CCL), previously derived from QCD with confinement interaction. Based on the calculations of the quark condensate, which is defined entirely by confinement in the zero quark mass limit, one can assert that chiral symmetry breaking occurs not spontaneously but is predetermined by confinement. The expansion of the CCL provides the GMOR relations and the effective chiral Lagrangian, which is used to provide the masses and decay constants of all chiral mesons, including $η,η'$. For the latter one needs to define a non-chiral co…
The mass function of the nonperturbative quark propagator in SU(3) gauge theory shows only a weak dependence on the vortex content of the gauge configurations. Of particular note is the survival of dynamical mass generation on vortex-free configurations having a vanishing string tension. This admits the possibility that mass generation associated with dynamical chiral symmetry breaking persists without confinement. In this presentation, we examine the low-lying ground-state hadron spectrum of the pi, rho, N and Delta and discover that while dynamical mass generation persists in the vortex-free…
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= 68 MeV and <q-bar q> = -(190 MeV)^3. It is compared with models inferred from studies of the gauge sector.
Continuum strong QCD is the application of models and continuum quantum field theory to the study of phenomena in hadronic physics, which includes; e.g., the spectrum of QCD bound states and their interactions. Herein I provide a Dyson-Schwinger equation perspective, focusing on qualitative aspects of confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking in cold, sparse QCD, and also elucidating consequences of the axial-vector Ward-Takahashi identity and features of the heavy-quark limit.
We study the relation between quark confinement and chiral symmetry breaking in QCD. Using lattice QCD formalism, we analytically express the various "confinement indicators", such as the Polyakov loop, its fluctuations, the Wilson loop, the inter-quark potential and the string tension, in terms of the Dirac eigenmodes. In the Dirac spectral representation, there appears a power of the Dirac eigenvalue $λ_n$ such as $λ_n^{N_t-1}$, which behaves as a reduction factor for small $λ_n$. Consequently, since this reduction factor cannot be cancelled, the low-lying Dirac eigenmodes give negligibly sm…
Employing functional approaches the infrared behaviour of Landau gauge QCD vertex functions is investigated. Results for the ghost-gluon, three-gluon and quark-gluon vertex functions are presented. As can be analytically shown a linear rising potential between heavy quarks is generated by infrared singularities in the dressed quark-gluon vertex. The selfconsistent mechanism that generates these singularities implies the existence of scalar Dirac amplitudes of the full vertex and the quark propagator. These amplitudes can only be present when chiral symmetry is broken, either explicitly or dyna…
I discuss the chiral dynamics of Gribov's theory of confinement. At a critical coupling $α_s^c$ the light quark vacuum undergoes a series of phase transitions which should be taken into account in the application of chiral perturbation theory. The Gribov theory offers a simple explanation of the value of the pion nucleon sigma term without need to invoke a large strange quark component in the nucleon.
Two crucial properties of QCD, confinement and chiral symmetry breaking, cannot be understood within the context of conventional Feynman perturbation theory. Non-perturbative phenomena enter the theory in a fundamental way at both the classical and quantum level. Over the years a coherent qualitative picture of the interplay between chiral symmetry, quantum mechanical anomalies, and the lattice has emerged and is reviewed here.
We analytically study the relation between quark confinement and spontaneous chiral-symmetry breaking in QCD. In terms of the Dirac eigenmodes, we derive some formulae for the Polyakov loop, its fluctuations, and the string tension from the Wilson loop. We also investigate the Polyakov loop in terms of the eigenmodes of the Wilson, the clover and the domain wall fermion kernels, respectively. For the confinement quantities, the low-lying Dirac/fermion eigenmodes are found to give negligible contribution, while they are essential for chiral symmetry breaking. These relations indicate no direct …
We study the QCD phase diagram, in particular we study the critical points of the two main QCD phase transitions, confinement and chiral symmetry breaking. Confinement drives chiral symmetry breaking, and, due to the finite quark mass, at small density both transitions are a crossover, while they are a first or second order phase transition in large density. We study the QCD phase diagram with a quark potential model including both confinement and chiral symmetry. This formalism, in the Coulomb gauge hamiltonian formalism of QCD, is presently the only one able to microscopically include both a…
We study confinement and chiral symmetry breaking phase transitions for QCD and supersymmetric QCD. The method is based on some justified assumption regarding the behavior of the Green function relevant for the potential between two charges or a gap equation. We determine the number of flavors at which the transitions to confinement and chiral symmetry breaking take place. We find that whereas for chiral symmetry breaking the results are in perfect agreement with those in the literature for confinement the situation is more complex.
The chirally symmetric overlap quark propagator is explored in Coulomb gauge for the first time. This gauge is especially well suited for studying the interrelation between confinement and chiral symmetry breaking, since confinement can be attributed to the infrared divergence of the vector dressing function of the inverse quark propagator. Using quenched gauge field configurations on a $20^4$ lattice, the dressing functions of the quark propagator as well as the dynamical quark mass function are evaluated, also in the chiral limit. Chiral symmetry is artificially restored by removing the low …
We study the QCD phase diagram, in particular we study the critical points of the two main QCD phase transitions, confinement and chiral symmetry breaking. Confinement drives chiral symmetry breaking, and, due to the finite quark mass, at small density both transitions are a crossover, while they are a first or second order phase transition in large density. We study the QCD phase diagram with a quark potential model including both confinement and chiral symmetry. This formalism, in the Coulomb gauge hamiltonian formalism of QCD, is presently the only one able to microscopically include both a…
We study interplay between confinement/deconfinement and chiral properties. We derive some analytical relations of the Dirac modes with the confinement quantities, such as the Polyakov loop, its susceptibility and the string tension. For the confinement quantities, the low-lying Dirac eigenmodes are found to give negligible contribution, while they are essential for chiral symmetry breaking. This indicates no direct, one-to-one correspondence between confinement/deconfinement and chiral properties in QCD. We also investigate the Polyakov loop in terms of the eigenmodes of the Wilson, the clove…
Using the eigen-mode of the QCD Dirac operator $\Slash D=γ^μD^μ$, we develop a manifestly gauge-covariant expansion and projection of the QCD operators such as the Wilson loop and the Polyakov loop. With this method, we perform a direct analysis of the correlation between confinement and chiral symmetry breaking in lattice QCD Monte Carlo calculations. Even after removing the low-lying Dirac modes, which are responsible to chiral symmetry breaking, we find that the Wilson loop obeys the area law, and the string tension or the confinement force is almost unchanged. We find also that the Polyako…
We develop a manifestly gauge-covariant expansion and projection using the eigen-mode of the QCD Dirac operator. Applying this method to the Wilson loop and the Polyakov loop, we perform a direct analysis of the correlation between confinement and chiral symmetry breaking in SU(3) lattice QCD calculation on 6^4 at beta=5.6 at the quenched level. Notably, the Wilson loop is found to obey the area law, and the slope parameter corresponding to the string tension or the confinement force is almost unchanged, even after removing the low-lying Dirac modes, which are responsible to chiral symmetry br…
We propose a model for the quark-antiquark interaction in Minkowski space using the Covariant Spectator Theory. We show that with an equal-weighted scalar-pseudoscalar structure for the confining part of our interaction kernel the axial-vector Ward-Takahashi identity is preserved and our model complies with the Adler-zero constraint for pi-pi-scattering imposed by chiral symmetry.
Gribov's scenario of confinement caused by supercritical charges is described and the present status of Gribov's equation for the Green function of light quarks is discussed.
Using the eigen-mode of the QCD Dirac operator $\Slash D=γ^μD^μ$, we develop a manifestly gauge-covariant expansion and projection of the QCD operators such as the Wilson loop and the Polyakov loop. With this method, we perform a direct analysis of the correlation between confinement and chiral symmetry breaking in lattice QCD Monte Carlo calculation on $6^4$ at $β$=5.6. Even after removing the low-lying Dirac modes, which are responsible to chiral symmetry breaking, we find that the Wilson loop obeys the area law, and the slope parameter corresponding to the string tension or the confinement …
Spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking is accepted to occur in low energy hadronic physics, resulting in the several successful theorems of PCAC. On the other hand scalar confinement is suggested both by the spectroscopy of hadrons and by the string picture of confinement. However these two evidences are apparently conflicting, because chiral symmetry breaking requires a chiral invariant coupling to the quarks, say a vector coupling like in QCD. Here we reformulate the coupling of the quarks to the string, and we are able to comply with chiral symmetry breaking, using scalar confinement. The res…
We construct an effective Lagrangian which illustrates why color deconfines when chiral symmetry is restored in hot gauge theories with quarks in the fundamental representation. For quarks in the adjoint representation we show that while deconfinement and the chiral transition do not need to coincide, entanglement between them is still present. Extension to the chemical potential driven transition is discussed.
In this paper we study the properties of QCD at nonzero chiral density $ρ_5$, which is introduced through chiral chemical potential $μ_5$. The study is performed within lattice simulation of QCD with dynamical rooted staggered fermions. We first check that $ρ_5$ is generated at nonzero $μ_5$ and in the chiral limit observe $ρ_5 \sim Λ_{QCD}^2 μ_5$. We also test the possible connection between confinement and topological fluctuations. To this end, we measured the topological susceptibility $χ_{\mbox{\footnotesize top}}$ and string tension $σ$ for various values of $μ_5$. We observed that both s…
Confinement without symmetry breaking in chiral gauge theories
School of Physics, Sun Yat-Sen University(中山大学物理学院);RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS), RIKEN(理化学研究所跨学科理论与数学科学中心(iTHEMS));Centre for Cosmology, Particle Physics and Phenomenology (CP3), Université catholique de Louvain(天主教鲁汶大学宇宙学、粒子物理与现象学中心(CP3))
We study the phase diagram of QCD with the help of order parameters for chiral symmetry breaking and quark confinement. We also introduce a new order parameter for the confinement phase transition, which is related to the quark density. It is easily accessible by different theoretical approaches, such as functional approaches or lattice simulations. Its relation to the Polyakov loop expectation value is discussed and the QCD phase diagram is analysed. Our results suggest a close relation between the chiral and the confinement phase transition.
In this work we present the results from numerical simulations of an interacting ensemble of instanton-dyons in the $SU(3)$ gauge group with $N_f=2$ flavors of massless quarks. Dynamical quarks are included via the effective interactions induced by the fermionic determinant evaluated in the subspace of topological zero modes. The eigenvalue spectrum of the Dirac operator is studied at different volumes to extract the chiral condensate and eigenvalue gap, with both observables providing consistent values of the chiral transition temperature $T_c$. We find that a sufficient density of dyons is r…
In the physical vacuum of QCD, the energy density of light-quark fields strongly coupled to slowly varying gluon fields can be negative, and so a condensate of pairs of quarks and antiquarks of nearly opposite momenta forms which breaks chiral symmetry, confines quarks, and makes gluons massive.
We illustrate why color deconfines when chiral symmetry is restored in gauge theories with quarks in the fundamental representation, and while these transitions do not need to coincide when quarks are in the adjoint representation, entanglement between them is still present.
We analyze the vacuum structure of SU(2) QCD with multiple massless adjoint representation fermions formulated on a small spatial $S^1 \times \R^3$. The absence of thermal fluctuations, and the fact that quantum fluctuations favoring the vacuum with unbroken center symmetry in a weakly coupled regime renders the interesting dynamics of these theories analytically calculable. Confinement, the area law behavior for large Wilson loops, and the generation of the mass gap in the gluonic sector are shown analytically. By abelian duality transformation, the long distance effective theory of QCD is ma…
Some of the difficulties arising when one tries to understand confinement as well as dynamical and anomalous chiral symmetry breaking are reviewed. Criteria to be fulfilled by a successful and complete picture of these phenomena are presented, and a few of the suggested explanations are listed.
Two-dimensional QED with $N$ flavor fermions is solved at zero and finite temperature with arbitrary fermion masses to explore QCD physics such as chiral condensate and string tension. The problem is reduced to solving a Schrödinger equation for $N$ degrees of freedom with a specific potential determined by the ground state of the Schrödinger problem itself.
The Lorentz nature of confinement in a heavy-light quarkonium is investigated. It is demonstrated that an effective scalar interaction is generated selfconsistently as a result of chiral symmetry breaking, and this effective scalar interaction is responsible for the QCD string formation between the quark and the antiquark.
We consider a holographic quark model where the confinement is a consequence of the quark condensate. Surprisingly, the equation of motion of our holographic model can be mapped to the old spin-less bag model. Both models correctly reproduce the linear Regge trajectory of hadrons for zero quark mass. For the case of non-zero quark mass, the model lead us to Heun's equation. The mass term is precisely the origin of the higher singularity, which changes the system behavior drastically. Our result can shed some light on why the chiral transition is so close to the confinement transition. In the m…
We start with the relation between the chiral symmetry breaking and gauge field topology. New lattice result further enhance the notion of Zero Mode Zone, a very narrow strip of states with quasizero Dirac eigenvalues. Then we move to the issue of "origin of mass" and Brown-RHo scaling: a number of empirical facts contradicts to the idea that masses of quarks and such hadrons as $ρ,N$ decrease near $T_c$. We argue that while at $T=0$ the main contribution to the effective quark mass is chirally odd $m_{\snchi}$, near $T_c$ it rotates to chirally-even component $m_χ$, because "infinite clusters…
The effective quark Lagrangian is derived from the QCD action by means of averaging over the vacuum fields. In the limit of large N_c and keeping for simplicity the lowest order gluonic correlator one obtains nonlinear equations for the quark propagator, exhibiting scalar confinement. Connection to the quark zero mode density is discussed.
A self-consistent holographic QCD model is proposed which can realize both chiral symmetry breaking and confinement, two most important phenomena of QCD. It is pointed out that the model can accommodate both Regge spectra of hadrons and the linear potential between quarks. The model is formulated in the framework of graviton-dilaton-scalar system, where the dilaton field is dual to the dimension-2 gluon condensate and can lead to the linear confinement, while the scalar field corresponds to the quark anti-quark condensate and can explain the property of chiral dynamics.
We construct an effective model for the chiral field and the Polyakov loop in which we can investigate the interplay between the approximate chiral symmetry restoration and the deconfinement of color in a thermal SU(3) gauge theory with three flavors of massive quarks. The phenomenological couplings between these two sectors can then be related to the recent lattice data on the renormalized Polyakov loop and the chiral condensate close to the critical region.
We study the QCD phase diagram, in particular we study the critical points of the two main QCD phase transitions, confinement and chiral symmetry breaking. Confinement drives chiral symmetry breaking, and, due to the finite quark mass, at small density both transitions are a crossover, while they are a first or second order phase transition in large density. We study the QCD phase diagram with a quark potential model including both confinement and chiral symmetry. This formalism, in the Coulomb gauge hamiltonian formalism of QCD, is presently the only one able to microscopically include both a…
We apply to lattice QCD a bosonization method previously developed in which dynamical bosons are generated by time-dependent Bogoliubov transformations. The transformed action can be studied by an expansion in the inverse of the nilpotency index, which is the number of fermionic states in the structure function of composite bosons. When this number diverges the model is solved by the saddle point method which has a variational interpretation. We give a stationary covariant solution for a background matter field whose fluctuations describe mesons. In the saddle point approximations live fermion…
A representative but not exhaustive review of the Schwinger-Dyson equation (SDE) approach to the nonperturbative study of QCD is presented. The main focus is the SDE for the quark self energy but studies of the gluon propagator and quark-gluon vertex are also discussed insofar as they are important to the quark SDE. The scope of this article is the application of these equations to the study of dynamical chiral symmetry breaking, quark confinement and the phenomenology of the spectrum and dynamics of QCD.
Inspired by the construction of the Gribov-Zwanziger action in the Landau gauge, we introduce a quark model exhibiting both confinement and chiral symmetry aspects. An important feature is the incorporation of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in a renormalizable fashion. The quark propagator in the condensed vacuum turns out to be of a confining type. Besides a real pole, it exhibits complex conjugate poles. The resulting spectral form is explicitly shown to violate positivity, indicative of its unphysical character. Moreover, the ensuing quark mass function fits well to existing lattice d…
Without any analytical assumption we solve the ladder QED2+1 in Minkowski space. Further, we transform Greens functions to the Temporal Euclidean space, wherein we show that in the special case of ladder QED2+1 the solution is fully equivalent to the Minkowski one. The obtained complex fermion propagator exhibits confinement because of the lack of the pole at the real timelike $q^2$ axis.
We construct a self-consistent holographic QCD model which can realize two most important phenomena of QCD, i.e. chiral symmetry breaking and confinement. The model is formulated in the framework of graviton-dilaton-scalar system, where the dilaton field is of dimension-2 which might be dual to the dimension-2 gluon condensate and can lead to the linear confinement, while the scalar field corresponds to the quark anti-quark condensate and can explain the property of chiral dynamics. Within this framework, both Regge spectra of hadrons and the linear potential between quarks can be accommodated…
We present a model for the quark-antiquark interaction formulated in Minkowski space using the Covariant Spectator Theory. The quark propagators are dressed with the same kernel that describes the interaction between different quarks. By applying the axial-vector Ward-Takahashi identity we show that our model satisfies the Adler-zero constraint imposed by chiral symmetry. For this model, our Minkowski-space results of the dressed quark mass function are compared to lattice QCD data obtained in Euclidean space. The mass function is then used in the calculation of the electromagnetic pion form f…
We demonstrate that $SO(N_{c})$ gauge theories with matter fields in the vector representation confine due to monopole condensation and break the $SU(N_{F})$ chiral symmetry to $SO(N_{F})$ via the quark bilinear. Our results are obtained by perturbing the ${\cal N}=1$ supersymmetric theory with anomaly-mediated supersymmetry breaking.
Nonperturbative features of QCD are studied using the dual Ginzburg-Landau (DGL) theory with QCD-monopoles. The linear quark potential appears in the QCD-monopole condensed vacuum. We find that QCD-monopole condensation plays an essential role to the dynamical chiral-symmetry breaking. We also investigate the QCD phase transition at finite temperature in the DGL theory.
The standard chiral perturbation theory is known to predict much weaker effects in magnetic field, than found in numerical lattice data. To overcome this disagreement we are using the effective chiral confinement Lagrangian, $L_{ECCL}$, containing both chiral and quark degrees of freedom, in the presence of external magnetic field. Without magnetic fields $L_{ECCL}$ reduces to the ordinary chiral Lagrangian $L_{EC L}$, yielding in the lowest order $O(\partial_μφ)^2$ all known relations, and providing explicit numerical coefficients in the higher $O(p^4, p^6)$ orders. The inclusion of the magne…
We study the gravitational-wave signal stemming from strongly coupled models featuring both, dark chiral and confinement phase transitions. We therefore identify strongly coupled theories that can feature a first-order phase transition. Employing the Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model, we focus our attention on SU(3) Yang-Mills theories featuring fermions in fundamental, adjoint, and two-index symmetric representations. We discover that for the gravitational-wave signals analysis, there are significant differences between the various representations. Interestingly we also observe that the two-i…
We employ a functional approach to investigate the confinement problem in quenched Landau gauge QCD. We demonstrate analytically that a linear rising potential between massive quarks is generated by infrared singularities in the dressed quark-gluon vertex. The selfconsistent mechanism that generates these singularities is driven by the scalar Dirac amplitudes of the full vertex and the quark propagator. These can only be present when chiral symmetry is broken. We have thus uncovered a novel mechanism that directly links chiral symmetry breaking with confinement.
Production rates of dileptons and photons from the quark-gluon (QGP) phase are calculated taking into account effects of confinement and spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking (χSB) not far from the transition temperature $T_c$. We find that the production rates of dileptons with large momenta and of photons originating from the QGP around $T_c$ are suppressed by the χSB effect. We also discuss to what extent information about details of the chiral transition, such as its characteristic temperature range and the steepness of the crossover, are reflected in these quantities.
The infrared behavior of the quark-gluon vertex of quenched Landau gauge QCD is studied by analyzing its Dyson-Schwinger equation. Building on previously obtained results for Green functions in the Yang-Mills sector we analytically derive the existence of power-law infrared singularities for this vertex. We establish that dynamical chiral symmetry breaking leads to the self-consistent generation of components of the quark-gluon vertex forbidden when chiral symmetry is forced to stay in the Wigner-Weyl mode. In the latter case the running strong coupling assumes an infrared fixed point. If chir…
In the lattice QCD formalism, we derive a gauge-invariant analytical relation connecting the Polyakov loop and the Dirac modes on a temporally odd-number lattice, where the temporal lattice size is odd, with the normal (nontwisted) periodic boundary condition. This analytical relation indicates that low-lying Dirac modes have little contribution to the Polyakov loop. Using lattice QCD simulations, we numerically confirm the analytical relation and the negligible contribution of low-lying Dirac modes to the Polyakov loop at the quenched level, i.e., the Polyakov loop is almost unchanged by remo…
Using the effective potential formalism, we study dynamical chiral symmetry breaking (D$χ$SB) in the dual Ginzburg-Landau (DGL) theory, where the color confinement is brought by monopole condensation. The effective potential as a function of infrared quark mass is found to have double-well structure, which leads to spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry. To examine the role of confinement, we divide the effective potential into the confinement part and others, which correspond to the confinement term and other (Yukawa, Coulomb) terms of the gluon propagator in the DGL theory. It is found that…
We address the old difficulty in accommodating the scalar quark-antiquark confining potential together with chiral symmetry breaking. We develop a quark confining potential inspired in the QCD scalar flux tube. The coupling to quarks consists in a double vector vertex. We study the Dirac and spin structure of this potential. In the limit of massless quarks the quark vertex is vector. Nevertheless symmetry breaking generates a new scalar quark vertex. In the heavy quark limit the coupling is mostly scalar. We solve the mass gap equation and find that this potential produces spontaneous chiral s…
We show that at the leading order in the large-$N$ expansion a lattice QCD motivated linear rising confinement potential at large distances leads to a non-local four-quark interaction that realizes spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry (SBCS) in the same way the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model does. The dynamical quark mass $m$, which represents the solution of the gap-equation, is proportional to the square root of the string tension $σ$ and takes the form at the leading order in the large-$N$ expansion $m=2 \sqrtσ/π$ with $σ=0.27$ GeV$^2$. The Nambu-Jona-Lasinio phenomenological constant $G_1$, w…
An effective Lagrangian for the light quark in the field of a static source is derived systematically using the exact field correlator expansion. The lowest Gaussian term is bosonized using nonlocal colorless bosonic fields and a general structure of effective chiral Lagrangian is obtained containing all set of fields. The new and crucial result is that the condensation of scalar isoscalar field which is a usual onset of chiral symmetry breaking and is constant in space-time, assumes here the form of the confining string and contributes to the confining potential, while the rest bosonic fields…
We study a model Dyson-Schwinger equation for the quark propagator closed using an {\it Ansatz} for the gluon propagator of the form \mbox{$D(q) \sim q^2/[(q^2)^2 + b^4]$} and two {\it Ansätze} for the quark-gluon vertex: the minimal Ball-Chiu and the modified form suggested by Curtis and Pennington. Using the quark condensate as an order parameter, we find that there is a critical value of $b=b_c$ such that the model does not support dynamical chiral symmetry breaking for $b>b_c$. We discuss and apply a confinement test which suggests that, for all values of $b$, the quark propagator in the m…