Chiral symmetry breaking
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In particle physics, chiral symmetry breaking is an example of spontaneous symmetry breaking affecting the chiral symmetry of a gauge theory such as Quantum Chromodynamics, the quantum field theory of the strong interactions.
An evident consequence of this symmetry breaking is the generation of 99% of the mass of nucleons, and hence the bulk of visible matter, out of very light quarks. The origin of the symmetry breaking may be described as a fermion condensate (vacuum condensate of bilinear expressions involving the fermions). The pion decay constant may be viewed as a measure of the magnitude of the chiral symmetry breaking. The Nambu-Goldstone bosons of the symmetry breaking (more precisely, the Pseudo-Goldstone bosons of it) are the charged and neutral pions, or more generally, the light pseudoscalar mesons.
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