QCD vacuum and baryon masses

Abstract

To study a possible role of the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) vacuum in nuclear and hadron physics, we evaluate a physical quantity in a candidate of the QCD vacuum. In this study, we adopt the Copenhagen (spaghetti) picture of the QCD vacuum and calculate the ground state baryon masses in a constituent quark model. We find that the calculated baryon mass does depend on a parameter that characterizes the Copenhagen picture of the QCD vacuum and satisfies the Gell-Mann–Okubo mass relation for the baryon octet. We also observe that the effective constituent quark mass defined in this study contains a contribution attributed to the Copenhagen vacuum, that is the gluon background field. We then estimate the value of the background gluon field as a function of the up (down) constituent quark mass by using the baryon masses as inputs.