Confinement, chiral symmetry breaking and the mass generation of hadrons

Abstract: 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 defined procedure and keep gluodynamics intact. Hadrons survive this artificial chiral restoration and their mass is surprisingly large. All hadrons fall into chiral multiplets and some of them are degenerate, i.e. the spectrum reveals some higher symmetry, that includes the chiral symmetry as a subgroup. The U(1)_A symmetry does not get restored after removal of the chiral modes from the valence quarks.