Chiral symmetry breaking and confinement: separating the scales
Nick Evans (Southampton U.)

I review arguments that chiral symmetry breaking is triggered when the quark bilinear condensate's dimension passes through one. This is supported by gap equations and more recently holographic models. Confinement may then be a separate property of the pure Yang-Mills theory below the scale of the dynamically generated quark mass, occurring at the scale of the pole in the deep IR running. Theories with more than one representation may have gaps between the condensation scales for the different representations with confinement below the lowest scale. Here, we use perturbative results for the running of the gauge coupling and gamma in asymptotically free SU(Nc) gauge theories with matter in higher dimension representations to seek the best candidate theories where confinement and chiral symmetry breaking can be maximally separated.