Chiral symmetry breaking as open string tachyon condensation Original Research Article

We consider a general framework to study holographically the dynamics of fundamental quarks in a confining gauge theory. Flavors are introduced by placing a set of (coincident) branes and antibranes on a background dual to a confining color theory. The spectrum contains an open string tachyon and its condensation describes the image symmetry breaking. By studying worldvolume gauge transformations of the flavor brane action, we obtain the QCD global anomalies and an IR condition that allows to fix the quark condensate in terms of the quark mass. We find the expected image Goldstone bosons (for image), the Gell-Mann–Oakes–Renner relation (for image small) and the image mass. Remarkably, the linear confinement behavior for the masses of highly excited spin-1 mesons, image is naturally reproduced.