Explicit chiral symmetry breaking and the 1/N expansion in models with multi-fermion interactions

Abstract

Explicit chiral symmetry breaking is a natural feature of many QCD inspired models with multi-quark interactions. To carry out the 1/N expansion of these theories, one integrates over the quark fields. In the process of calculating the one-loop fermion determinant which is not chiral invariant due to quark masses, special care must be taken in order not to alter the original symmetry breaking pattern of the Lagrangian. We show how to do this consistently.