Dressed-quarks and the nucleon's axial charge

Lei Chang, Craig D. Roberts, Sebastian M. Schmidt

Published 2012-07-23, updated 2012-09-11Version 2

The nucleon's axial charge, g_A, expresses features that are both fundamental to the strong interaction and crucial to its connection with weak interaction physics. We show that dynamical chiral symmetry breaking (DCSB) suppresses the axial-charge of a dressed-quark, g_A^q, at infrared momenta. Since this effect disappears as chiral symmetry is restored, one may argue that g_A vanishes with the restoration of chiral symmetry because no nucleon bound-state survives the associated transition. The suppression of g_A^q is shown to be part of an explanation for a 25% reduction of g_A from its nonrelativistic quark-model value. Critical too, however, is the presence of dressed-quark angular momentum within the nucleon. The value of g_A^q depends on the kernels of the gap and Bethe-Salpeter equations. We find that incorporation of essentially nonperturbative effects associated with DCSB into these kernels inflates the value relative to that obtained at leading-order in a widely used truncation of QCD's Dyson-Schwinger equations. Such corrections also affect the nucleon's axial radius. In both cases, however, agreement with experiment will require similar improvements to the Faddeev kernel and associated interaction current.