Arthur Ferreira Vieira: The fate of chiral symmetry in Riemann-Cartan geometry

We study the mechanism of chiral symmetry breaking for fermionic systems in a gravitational background with curvature and torsion. The analysis is based on a scale-dependent effective potential derived from a bosonized version of the Nambu-Jona-Lasino model in a Riemann-Cartan background. We have investigated the fate of chiral symmetry in two different regimes. First, to gain some intuition on the combined effect of curvature and torsion, we investigate the regime of weak curvature and torsion. However, this regime does not access the deep infrared limit, which is essential to answer questions related to the mechanism of gravitational catalysis in fermionic systems. Second, we look at the regime of vanishing curvature and homogeneous torsion. In this case, although we cannot probe the combined effects of curvature and torsion, we can access the deep infrared contributions of the background torsion to the mechanism of chiral symmetry breaking. Our main finding is that, in the scenario where only torsion is present, there is no indication of a mechanism of gravitational catalysis.