Chiral spin symmetry

Abstract

We review the chiral spin symmetry, which is a symmetry of the color charge and of the confining electric part of QCD. Observation of this symmetry in the vacuum upon truncation of the near-zero modes of the Dirac operator implies that the hadron mass in the light quark sector is not due to the quark condensate of the vacuum and that confinement and chiral symmetry breaking are not directly related. Observation of this symmetry above the chiral symmetry restoration crossover suggests that QCD is still in the confining regime with chirally symmetric quarks bound into the color-singlets by the confining electric field. This regime of QCD was called a stringy fluid. At a temperature T_d that is essentially above T_ch the chiral spin symmetry smoothly disappears suggesting that the confining electric field gets screened and one observes a very smooth crossover to the quark-gluon plasma. The three-regimes picture has been further substantiated by the analysis of the N_c scaling of the energy density, the pressure and the entropy density. In the hadron gas they scale as N_c^0, in the stringy fluid as N_c^1 and in the quark-gluon plasma as N_c^2. We have analyzed the fluctuations of conserved charges that scale as N_c^1 above T_ch thus indicating a transition from the hadron gas to the stringy fluid. When N_c gets sufficiently large the three-regimes picture transforms into the three-phases phase diagram. Finally we discuss a confining and chirally symmetric model in 3+1 dimensions. This model demonstrates the chiral symmetry restoration in the confining regime and a delocalization of the color-singlet quark-antiquark systems that become very large at T > T_ch. Consequently the stringy fluid matter is a very dense highly collective system of the overlapping very large color-singlet quark-antiquark "mesons" with a very small mean free path.