Studying pion effects in the quark propagator

Within the framework of Schwinger–Dyson and Bethe–Salpeter equations we investigate the importance of pions for the quark–gluon interaction. To this end we choose a truncation for the quark–gluon vertex that includes intermediate pion degrees of freedom and adjust the interaction such that unquenched lattice results for various current quark masses are reproduced. After extrapolation to the physical point we find a considerable contribution of the pion back reaction to the quark mass function as well as to the chiral condensate.