Constituent quark

The Konstituentenquarkmasse referred to in QCD the effective mass of the constituent quarks, are included in certain parts of the interaction between the quarks already. It is used for the description of hadrons in the low energy limit, where a perturbative analysis is not possible.

Scattering experiments revealed that hadrons are composed not only of bare quarks ( current quarks ), but also so-called sea quarks and gluons from (virtual quark-antiquark pairs as suggestions of the quantum field theory vacuum). From the interaction with the sea quarks and gluons or from the dynamic breaking of chiral symmetry is Konstituentenquarkmassen that are much higher than the current quark masses arise. Thus, for example, explain the observed masses of the proton and neutron, which are significantly higher than the sum of the current quark masses of the light up and down quarks, from which they are constructed.

For the heavy quarks (c, b, t ) is the current quark mass so dominant that there is little difference to Konstituentenquarkmasse.