Chiral symmetry breaking and the generation of light hadron masses

Abstract: A quantitative study of the effects of dynamical chiral symmetry breaking on the mass generation of the low-lying hadrons in a dynamical lattice QCD simulation is presented. The evolution of light hadron masses upon increasing the number of low-lying Dirac operator eigenmodes in the quark propagators is confronted with the hadron masses obtained upon removal of such low-lying eigenmodes from standard full quark propagators. The low-lying chiral symmetry breaking modes provide roughly two third of the nucleon and $\rho$ masses, while the $a_1$ mass is affected to a much smaller degree.