Functional Integral in terms of the Field Strength: An Approach to Chiral Symmetry Breaking

Abstract

The chiral symmetry breaking in the 4-dimensional QED with the chirally invariant four-fermion interaction is discussed by using a novel path integral expression in terms of the field-strength tensor. In the local potential approximation, we find that the chiral symmetry is spontaneously broken for any nonzero gauge and four-fermion couplings on the tree level of an auxiliary field $\sigma$. The present approach allows us to easily include higher orders of the gauge coupling so that the effective potential up to the sixth order is obtained.