Paper detail

Is chiral symmetry broken and or restored in high-mass light baryons?

Based on a thorough comparison of the nucleon and $Δ$ excitation spectrum with models we show that parity doublets observed in the mass spectra do not entail the consequence that highly excited $N$ or $Δ$ resonances are insensitive to chiral symmetry breaking. Instead, the mechanism of mass generation in excited states is suggested to be the same as for the baryon ground states: the mass is assigned to fluctuating gluon fields and their strong attraction. In excited baryons, the field energy has to be integrated over a larger volume, and the total mass increases. Thus, also the additional mass of resonances, the excitation energy, is generated by spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry.