Higgs description of two-flavor QCD vacuum

A Higgs description for the QCD vacuum in the limit of two quark flavors is proposed. Complete "spontaneous breaking" of color symmetry is realized by condensation of an adjoint quark-antiquark and a quark-quark pair. The vac uum is invariant under isospin symmetry applying color and flavor transform ations simultaneously. All elementary excitations: acquire integral charges . The dressed microscopic quark and gluon degrees of freedom can be identif ied with the macroscopic baryon and vector meson degrees of freedom. In add ition to the nucleons we find soliton-type fermions with integer isospin. T heir presence provides an important test accessible to lattice QCD simulati ons. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.