Chiral symmetry restoration in excited hadrons

The evidence and the theoretical justification of chiral symmetry restoration in high-lying hadrons is presented.

We overview two interconnected topics: possible effective restoration of chiral symmetry in highly excited hadrons and possible existence of confined but chirally symmetric matter at low temperatures and high densities.

Physics of the low-lying and high-lying hadrons in the light flavor sector is reviewed. While the low-lying hadrons are strongly affected by the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry, in the high-lying hadrons the chiral symmetry is restored. A manifestation of the chiral symmetry restoration in excited hadrons is a persistence of the chiral multiplet structure in both baryon and meson spectra. Meson and baryon chiral multiplets are classified. A relation between the chiral...

These lectures discuss the question of whether a key feature is seen in hadron spectroscopy--the near degeneracy of hadrons with different parity and/or spin. It has been conjectured that this is due to an effective restoration of chiral symmetry. The conjecture is that while these states are, of course, in the symmetry-broken (Nambu-Goldstone) phase, as one goes higher in the spectrum the states become progressively less sensitive to the dynamics of chiral symmetry breaking....

A simple solvable toy model exhibiting effective restoration of chiral symmetry in excited hadrons is constructed. A salient feature is that while physics of the low-lying states is crucially determined by the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry, in the high-lying states the effects of chiral symmetry breaking represent only a small correction. Asymptotically the states approach the regime where their properties are determined by the underlying unbroken chiral symmetry.

Restoration of chiral and $U(1)_A$ symmetries in excited hadrons is reviewed. A connection of these restorations with the semiclassical regime in highly excited hadron is discussed. A solvable confining field-theoretical toy model that exhibits chiral restoration is presented. Implications of the string description of the highly excited hadrons that suggests an additional dynamical symmetry of the spectra on the top of $U(2)_L \times U(2)_R$ are presented.

Spectral enhancement near the 2m_{\pi} threshold in the I=J=0 channel in nuclei is shown to be a distinct signal of the partial restoration of chiral symmetry. The relevance of this phenomenon with the possible detection of 2\pi^{0} and 2\gamma in hadron-nucleus and photo-nucleus reactions is discussed.

It is discussed how chiral symmetry restoration manifests itself through mixing of vector and axial-vector correlators. The vector correlator is directly accessible in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Within models of the vector correlator its implications for low-mass dilepton spectra are reviewed.

This comment critically discusses certain aspects of a recent paper on parity doubling in the hadronic spectrum and its possible connection to chiral symmetry restoration.

An introduction to the methods and ideas of Chiral Perturbation Theory is presented in this talk. The discussion is illustrated with some phenomenological predictions that can be compared with available experimental results.