Confinement, DCSB, bound states, and the quark-gluon vertex

Aspects of the dressed-quark-gluon vertex and their role in the gap and Bethe-Salpeter equations are briefly surveyed using an intuitive model. The model allows one to elucidate why a linear extrapolation to the chiral limit of extant lattice data on the dressed-quark mass-function overestimates this function and hence the value of the vacuum quark condensate. The diagrammatic content of the vertex described is explicitly enumerable. This property is essential to the symmetry preserving study of bound state properties. It facilitates a realistic analysis of vector and pseudoscalar meson masses, and also allows the accuracy of standard truncations to be gauged. The splitting between vector and pseudoscalar meson masses is observed to vanish as the current-quark mass increases. That argues for the mass of the pseudoscalar partner of the ϒ(1S) to be above 9.4 GeV. Moreover, in this limit the rainbow-ladder truncation provides an increasingly accurate estimate of a bound state's mass.