# Comment on “Chiral Corrections in Hadron Spectroscopy”

## Abstract

It is shown that the principal pattern in baryon spectroscopy, which is associated with the flavor-spin dependent hyperfine interaction, is due to the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry in QCD and thus cannot be addressed by chiral perturbation theory, which is based on the explicit chiral symmetry breaking.

In a recent preprint  Thomas and Krein questioned the foundations of the description of the baryon spectrum with a chiral constituent quark model . The argument made was that the splitting pattern implied by the operator

$$\stackrel{}{\tau }_i\stackrel{}{\tau }_j\stackrel{}{\sigma }_i\stackrel{}{\sigma }_j,$$
(1)   
should be inconsistent with chiral symmetry because it is inconsistent with the leading nonanalytic contribution to baryon mass predicted by the chiral perturbation theory (ChPT). I here show that ChPT has no bearing on this issue.   

There are two distinct aspects of chiral symmetry in QCD. The first one is the spontaneous (dynamical) breaking of chiral symmetry, which leads to the constituent (dynamical) masses of quarks (which are related to the quark condensates), massless Goldstone bosons, and their couplings to constituent quarks. As a result there appears in the chiral limit the massless Goldstone boson exchange interaction between the constituent quarks:

$$V_\chi =\frac{g^2}{4\pi }\frac{1}{12m^2}\stackrel{}{\tau }_i\stackrel{}{\tau }_j\stackrel{}{\sigma }_i\stackrel{}{\sigma }_j4\pi \delta (\stackrel{}{r}),$$
(2)   
where the tensor force component which is irrelevant to discussion here, has been dropped.

In reality the contact interaction (2) is smeared by the finite size of constituent quarks and pions <sup>*</sup><sup>*</sup>*Note that in the chiral limit the volume integral constraint, $`𝑑\stackrel{}{r}V_\pi (\stackrel{}{r})=0`$, does not apply  as in this case the pion Green function $`\frac{1}{(\stackrel{}{q})^2}`$ exactly cancels the $`(\stackrel{}{q})^2`$ behaviour supplied by the pion-quark vertices.. Following to Thomas and Krein I consider for simplicity only the pion-exchange part of the complete Goldstone boson exchange interaction.   

The second aspect of the chiral symmetry is its explicit breaking by the nonzero mass of current quarks. This will slightly modify the constituent mass $`m`$ because of the direct contribution of current quark mass and because of pion loop self-energy corrections, which are subject to renormalization. The other implication of the explicit chiral symmetry breaking is that the pion obtains a finite mass $`\mu `$, which to leading order is illustrated by the current algebra (Gell-Mann - Oakes - Renner relations). As a consequence there appears a long-range Yukawa potential interaction between quarks

$$V_\chi =\frac{g^2}{4\pi }\frac{1}{12m^2}\stackrel{}{\tau }_i\stackrel{}{\tau }_j\stackrel{}{\sigma }_i\stackrel{}{\sigma }_j\left(\mu ^2\frac{e^{\mu r}}{r}4\pi \delta (\stackrel{}{r})\right).$$
(3)   
Chiral perturbation theory only concerns the implications of the explicit chiral symmetry breaking term in (3) and hence by definition cannot be used to derive the expression (2).   

The idea of the chiral constituent quark model  is that the main features of the baryon spectrum are supplied by the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry, i.e. by the constituent mass of quarks and the interaction (2) between them Note that the short-range interaction of the same type comes also from the $`\rho `$-meson-exchange and/or correlated two-pion-exchange, etc, and there are important reasons to believe that the latter contributions are also important .. As a consequence the $`N`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ are split already in the chiral limit, as it must be. The expressions (in the notation of ref. )

$$M_N=M_015P_{00}^\pi ,$$

$$M_\mathrm{\Delta }=M_03P_{00}^\pi ,$$
(4)   
where $`P_{00}^\pi `$ is positive, arise from the interaction (2). The long-range Yukawa tail, which has the opposite sign represents only a small perturbation. It is in fact possible to obtain a near perfect fit of the baryon spectrum in a dynamical 3-body calculation in the chiral limit, neglecting the long-range Yukawa tail contribution, with a quality even better than that of .   

The implication is that ChPT has no bearing on the interactions (1) and (2) (nor on the the expressions (4), which should be considered as leading order contributions ($`m_c^0`$, where $`m_c`$ is current quark mass) within chiral perturbation theory. This does not mean, however, that the systematic corrections from the finite meson (current quark) mass should be ignored.   

The pion-exchange Yukawa tail contribution contains at the same time part of corrections from the leading nonanalytic order, $`\mu ^3`$, as well as part of the corrections from the other orders, with opposite sign. A rough idea about importance of these corrections for the $`N`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ can be obtained from the comparison of the contributions of the first and second terms in (3) in nonperturbative calculations . The former one turns out to be much smaller than the latter. This is because of a small matter radius of the $`N`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ . For highly excited states, however, the role of the Yukawa tail increases because of a bigger baryon size and thus the importance of the ChPT corrections should be expected to increase. To consider these corrections systematically one definitely needs to consider the loop contributions to the interactions between constituent quarks as well as the couplings to decay channels, which is rather involved task. This task is one for constituent quark chiral perturbation theory which is awaiting practical implementation.